Dr. Claudia Fallini, Assistant Professor, University of Rhode Island, was awarded a NIH/NINDS R01 award on April 1st entitled “Defining the mechanisms and consequences of nuclear defects in ALS/FTD” for 5-years totaling $1,250,000 (2021-2026). Dr. Fallini said, “I cannot thank the RI-INBRE enough for their support at a critical time of my career. During the difficult times of the COVID-19 pandemic, the staff and faculty at RI-INBRE were incredibly helpful and made sure I had full access to the resources I needed to maintain and grow my research program. Thanks to their financial support and open access to the RI-INBRE core facilities, I was able to obtain new preliminary data that were key to prove the feasibility and to support the rationale of the proposal’s central hypothesis. The support I received from RI-INBRE’s Early Career Development award (2020-2021) was absolutely crucial to the successful drafting and packaging of this NIH award!” This award represents a very early graduation of Dr. Fallini from the RI-INBRE program. 

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NSF CHE Career Award

Dr. Jiyeon Kim, Assistant Professor, University of Rhode Island, was awarded a 5-year NSF CHE Career Award (May 2, 2021) entitled “Multimodal Single Entity Electrochemistry at Nanoscale Liquid/Liquid Interfaces” totaling $607,500. Dr. Kim is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University Rhode Island and was awarded an Early Career Development award on May 1st of 2020. Her receipt of the NSF award exemplifies early graduation from the RI-INBRE program. Dr. Kim said “With RI-INBRE support, we could successfully produce preliminary results of direct measurements of phase boundary potential at intact individual ion-selective nanoemulsions (NEs), and get the NSF Career award in 2021. In this work, technically, the introduction of ion-selective NEs enabled no need of inner solution, i.e., no transmembrane ion flux in our sensing system, thus essentially lowering the limit of detection up to sub ppt level. Another innovative aspect in the technical achievement is no need for electrical contact between sensing membrane (NE) and probe surface, thus simplifying the instrumentation. All these findings validates the feasibility of our new experimental approaches on the ultrasensitive detection of ionic species using two distinct nanoscale domains at liquid-liquid interfaces, i.e. NE and nanopipets, thus fortifying the concept and importance of fundamental understanding and practical applications of multimodal single-entity electrochemistry at nanoscale liquid-liquid interface.”