Department News

Department News

portrait of William Pomerantz
Faculty Honors/Awards

Professor Pomerantz to co-chair ICBS Global Council

Posted

The International Chemical Biology Society (ICBS) has announced that William C. K. Pomerantz, McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, has been selected as the co-chair of the ICBS Global Council by the ICBS Board of Directors.

professor Sapna Sarupria
Faculty Profiles

Professor Sapna Sarupria joins Department of Chemistry

Posted

Associate Professor Sapna Sarupria is joining the Department of Chemistry faculty in Fall 2021. She is moving from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Clemson University.

Professor Courtney Roberts
Faculty Honors/Awards

Professor Roberts receives Leadership Development Award

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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

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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

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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

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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.