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Daniel Keane, CHE PhD ’24, and Elnaz Nikoumanesh, CHE PhD ’25, have both received travel awards from the Division of Polymer Physics (DPOLY) to attend the Additive Manufacturing Short Course at the American Physical Society March Meeting in Minneapolis, MN. Elnaz also received a travel award from the Division of Soft Matter (DSOFT) to attend the March Meeting.

Daniel and Elnaz will both be presenting contributed talks and posters, engaging with world leaders across disciplines in physics.

Congratulations to both students for receiving these awards recognizing their hard work and contributions to soft matter and polymer physics!

The American Institute of Chemical Engineers recently highlighted our research on the cover of AIChE Journal and in a feature in Chemical Engineering Processes magazine.

Our work aims to understand how nanoparticles penetrate and transport through biological tissues so that we can better design and innovate drug delivery strategies. To accomplish this task, we developed a new class of biomimetic materials known as polymer-linked emulsions which replicate both the structure and mechanics of soft tissues. A team of graduate and undergraduate students – Daniel Keane, Colby Constantine, and Matthew Mellor – then conducted optical tracking measurements in these materials to demonstrate that we sufficiently replicate biologically relevant transport properties. Future work will establish correlations between the in vitro transport observed in polymer-linked emulsions and in vivo transport observed in animal models to (1) better understand the mechanisms underlying nanoparticle transport, and (2) predict performance of drug delivery vectors.