5/18/2021 Meg Dickinson
Seven graduate students, including two HMNTL students, have been awarded 2021 Beckman Institute Graduate Fellowships. The 2021 honorees from HMNTL are Amanda Weiss in molecular and integrative physiology and Bashar Emon in mechanical science and engineering.
Written by Meg Dickinson
Seven graduate students, including two HMNTL students, have been awarded 2021 Beckman Institute Graduate Fellowships. The program offers University of Illinois graduate students at the M.A., M.S., or Ph.D. level the opportunity to pursue interdisciplinary research at the institute.
The 2021 honorees from HMNTL are Amanda Weiss in molecular and integrative physiology and Bashar Emon in mechanical science and engineering.
Bashar Emon is pursuing a Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics and will work with Taher Saif of mechanical science and engineering, Rohit Bhargava of bioengineering, and Kannanganattu Prasanth of cell and developmental biology. He hopes to develop a new tool to study biological processes in space and time, in both their physical and chemical components.
He’ll combine a 3D biophysical sensor developed in Saif’s lab with Raman chemical imaging developed in Bhargava’s group. He hopes his new system will, for the first time, allow live imaging of cytoskeletal activities while measuring cell force and remodeling. He hopes it will show how cell force drives intracellular functions and how connective cells communicate with cancer cells. His work may eventually be used to study cancer progression and can be applied to other organs and systems.
Amanda Weiss is pursuing a Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology. She will work with Martha Gillette of cell and developmental biology and Hyunjoon Kong of chemical and biomolecular engineering. She will study how the blood-brain barrier's permeability (or how easily substances can move into the body's brain and nervous tissue) is related to circadian rhythms, or the body's 24-hour internal cycles. A more permeable blood-brain barrier can cause strokes and neurodegeneration, and the accumulation of fibrin and other blood-derived factors can cause inflammation and cellular damage.
Weiss will learn about the circadian rhythms of endothelial cells, which line the blood-brain barrier. She'll then measure their permeability at different phases in the circadian cycle. Her work will help researchers better understand why early mornings are a peak time for strokes and why blood factors are so bad for brain cells and function.
Read the full article with all the recipients here.