Graduate Student News
Ph.D. student Jen Hewitt was awarded a prestigious Fulbright Fellowship to perform
research at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing (MPI-AGE) in Cologne, Germany,
for nine months as part of her dissertation work. Jen, whose dissertation is directed
by Dr. Vanapalli, uses the model organism C. elegans to study aging and disease. She
has developed a novel platform for assessing animal health through its physiology,
with one primary outcome being a functional model for screening compounds for treating
Duchenne muscular dystrophy. During her Fulbright, Jen will use these physiological
assays coupled with novel aging-related subcellular markers being studied in Dr. Antebi's
lab at MPI-AGE to link how changes at the subcelluar level affect neuromuscular health.
She plans to investigate the efficacy of interventions to aging including pharmacological
compounds, exercise, and genetic manipulations with an overreaching goal to understand
the mechanisms of aging and its effective prevention.
Ph.D. Student Jasim Uddin has received considerable attention in the past year for
his dissertation work. His research, performed under the supervision of Dr. Harvinder
Gill, focuses on developing allergen-free pollen grains to deliver oral vaccines and
involves characterizing pollens and studying their interaction with innate immune
cells, and their safety. As part of his work, he collected antibody response data
from 70 vaccinated mice for two years and demonstrated that mice vaccinated with echinate
pollen showed a significantly higher long-term immune response than those vaccinated
with conventional methods. His research has been highlighted on the cover of the Journal
of Controlled Release, and he was the first student in our department to be awarded
the Horn Professor's Graduate Student Achievement Award. He also won the 'Best of
Conference' award in the 2018 Texas Tech Graduate Student Research Poster Competition.
Most recently, he was awarded a $ 1600 travel award to present his work at the Controlled
Release Society meeting.
Ph.D. student Nazam Sakib was co-winner of the NATAS Student Award, sponsored by SETARAM.
Naz received a $ 500 honorarium and gave a special oral presentation at the annual
meeting of the North American Thermal Analysis Society (NATAS), held in Philadelphia
during the second week of August. Naz' research, supervised by Dr. Sindee Simon, focuses
on the thermal and rheological characterization of polymer-grafted nanocomposites.
An important contribution from the work has been measurement of the decrease in the
heat capacity and configurational entropy of the grafted polymer chains. In addition
to Naz' award, Ph.D. students Madhusudhan Pallaka and Qian Tian, also supervised by
Dr. Simon, received Travel Awards to attend the same meeting. Madhu presented his
work on nanoconfined epoxy polymerization, and Qian presented work on the effect of
the beta relaxation on enthalpy recovery in glasses.
Ph.D. students Apoorva Sridhar and Mustafizur Rahman made the cover of ChemCatChem
for their work, co-authored with their dissertation advisor, Dr. Sheima Khatib. In
their article, the group demonstrates how methane from natural gas can be upgraded
directly into benzene and hydrogen, both of which are chemical commodities using a
mixed Mo‐C‐Fe catalyst supported on a ZSM‐5 structure. The researchers find that adding
small quantities of Fe oxide to Mo oxide enhances the yield to benzene. In addition,
both benzene yield and catalytic stability are enhanced by precarburization of the
catalysts to form modified Mo carbide species before reaction.
Edward E. Whitacre Jr. College of Engineering
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