Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Category
Rafat receives Conquer Cancer Award from Concern Foundation
Nov. 18, 2020—Marjan Rafat, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, has received an award for young and innovative cancer researchers from the Concern Foundation. With it, she will investigate whether and how radiation therapy for triple negative breast cancer encourages circulating tumor cells to return to the original tumor site, creating conditions for relapse. She...
Engineering lab returns during Vanderbilt’s Research Ramp-up to advance research in neurodegeneration
Nov. 16, 2020—The lab of Ethan Lippmann, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and biomedical engineering, seeks to model, understand, and ultimately treat neurodegeneration, focusing primarily on the blood-brain barrier, a border of protective blood vessels found in the brain. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Lippmann’s team in the Neurovascular Engineering and Therapeutic Design Laboratory was firing...
Team’s sustained work in T-cell immune response awarded P01 grant totaling $11 million
Oct. 4, 2020—For more than a decade Matt Lang and collaborators across the U.S. have worked to recreate key components of T-cells and how they know when to start fighting disease. Conventional wisdom suggested that T-cells formed regular, force-free bonds with infected cells, and in doing so caused the chain reaction of immune response. The team slowly...
NSF seed grant supports biomanufacturing of new drug delivery technologies
Oct. 2, 2020—Vanderbilt researchers awarded one of NSF’s 24 new projects to drive future manufacturing One of the challenges of drug delivery systems is to optimize their targeting properties so therapeutic compounds used in smaller amounts reach only a specific area of the body and result in little or no side effects. The ability to engineer the...
Nobel Laureate Frances Arnold creates new enzymes by following nature’s lessons
Sep. 17, 2020—Mixing chemistry, biology and engineering, Frances Arnold tweaks enzymes found in nature to perform new tricks by altering their DNA. Arnold, a Caltech chemical engineer with a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, scads more awards and honors, and research citations through the roof, delivered a rousing virtual lecture to some 700 listeners—almost twice. “You missed a...
Engineering School is No. 37 in 2021 U.S. News undergraduate program rankings
Sep. 14, 2020—The Vanderbilt School of Engineering is No. 37 in the U.S. News & World Report’s 2021 Best Colleges rankings released today. The school is tied with Brown University, University of California-Irvine, University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Virginia. MIT is ranked No. 1. The U.S. News rankings of the 206 undergraduate engineering programs accredited by ABET, and where the...
Nobel Laureate Frances Arnold to deliver the Hall Engineering Lecture Sept. 15
Aug. 26, 2020—Nobel Prize-winning chemical engineer Frances Arnold will deliver the Vanderbilt School of Engineering’s fall John R. and Donna S. Hall Engineering Lecture Tuesday, Sept. 15, at 4 p.m. CT. Her lecture, “Innovation by Evolution: Bringing New Chemistry to Life,” is free and open to the public. It will be live streamed and registration is required. Arnold’s work centers on...
Engineers develop better graphene sieve that could advance clean water efforts
Aug. 14, 2020—Developing atomically thin graphene membranes used to separate salt from water is extraordinarily complex and the effort grows more crucial as population growth, industrialization and climate change strain freshwater resources. Vanderbilt engineering researchers report a breakthrough in scalable fabrication of graphene membrane with a sealing technology that corrects variations in the pore size so they...