Department News

Department News

Professor Courtney Roberts
Faculty Honors/Awards

Professor Roberts receives Leadership Development Award

Posted

The American Chemical Society and its Young Chemists Committee (YCC) has award Professor Courtney Roberts with a Leadership Development Award, supporting her participation in the YCC Leadership Development Workshop. The YCC program recognizes emerging leaders in the profession and helps them prepare for the leadership opportunities at volunteer organizations such as ACS, and in their professional careers.

Fluorescent cells
Research Highlights

Researchers discover new way to deliver DNA-based therapies for diseases

Posted

University of Minnesota Twin Cities researchers in the labs of Professor Renee Frontiera and Professor Theresa Reineke have created a new polymer to deliver DNA and RNA-based therapies for diseases. For the first time in the industry, the researchers were able to see exactly how polymers interact with human cells when delivering medicines into the body. This discovery opens the door for more widespread use of polymers in applications like gene therapy and vaccine development.

Daniel Huh, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Associates Honors & Awards

Daniel Huh, Ph.D., receives NIH Fellowship

Posted

Daniel Huh, Ph.D., a post-doctoral associate working with Professor Ian Tonks, has received a Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Individual National Research Service Award. His research involves, "Designing Ligand Platforms of Titanium Imido Catalysts and Statistically Screening Alkyne Substrates for [2+2+1] Regioselective Pyrrole Synthesis." 

portrait of William Pomerantz
Research Highlights

Professor Pomerantz to develop epigenetic therapies for aggressive brain cancers

Posted

Professor William Pomerantz' lab has received a $100,000 grant from the Humor to Fight the Tumor Foundation to support its chemical epigenetics research project to develop new inhibitors for the treatment of diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma.

Professor George Barany
Faculty Honors/Awards, Faculty Profiles

Professor Barany elected Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors

Posted

Distinguished McKnight University Professor George Barany has been elected a 2020 Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors® (NAI). He is being honored for “. . . demonstrating a highly prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made tangible impacts on the quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society."

chemical symbols on colored balls
Student Honors/Awards

Students honored for 4th-Year Virtual Seminar Series talks

Posted

Eight graduate students—Yukun Cheng, Ethan Gormong, Katherine Jones, Nathan Love, Bach Nguyen, Claire Seitzinger, Christopher Warkentin, and Huda Zahid—were selected as winners of the 4th-Year Virtual Seminar Series that replaced the annual 3rd-year Graduate Student Research Symposium, which was canceled in Spring 2020 due to Covid-19.

illustration of Professor Reineke's research on the Efficient Polymer-Mediated Delivery of Gene-Editing Ribonucleoprotein Payloads through Combinatorial Design, Parallelized Experimentation, and Machine Learning
Research Highlights

Efficient polymer-mediated delivery of gene-editing RNP payloads

Posted

Professor Theresa Reineke’s research on genome-editing payloads continues. An article on the latest break-through research, Efficient Polymer-Mediated Delivery of Gene-Editing Ribonucleoprotein Payloads through Combinatorial Design, Parallelized Experimentation, and Machine Learning, has been published in ACS Nano.

Professor Ian Tonks
Faculty Honors/Awards

Professor Tonks appointed associate editor of Organometallics

Posted

Professor Ian A. Tonks has been appointed as an associate editor for the American Chemical Society journal Organometallics, effective Dec 1, 2020.

Professor Nicholas Race
Faculty Honors/Awards

Professor Race wins 2021 Thieme Chemistry Journal Award

Posted

Nicholas Race, assistant professor of chemistry, has won a 2021 Thieme Chemistry Journal Award. This award is presented every year to up-and-coming researchers worldwide who are in the early stages of their independent academic career as assistant or junior professors.

Student Honors/Awards

Brian Carrick wins 1st place in AIChE competition

Posted

Brian Carrick, a junior undergraduate student double majoring in chemical engineering and chemistry, tied for first place in the 2020 American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Student Technical Presentation Competition.