Day: April 5, 2024

Cody Tuftee and Victoria Santillan Place at GRC 2024

The Michigan Tech Graduate Research Colloquium (GRC) and Annual Banquet 2024 was held on March 27.

Congratulations to the GRC winners.

Oral Presentation

First Place: Natalie Nold
Second Place: Nithin Allwayin
Third Place: Brilynn Janckila

Poster Presentation

First Place: Jessica Czarnecki
Second Place: Cody Tuftee (BME)
Third Place: Victoria Santillan (BME)

Second Place Poster

Drug Eluting Microgels as an Immunomodulatory Corneal Wound
Sealant

Authors: Cody Tuftee, Saad Asim, Gary Hin-Fai Yam, Muhammad Rizwan

Poster Extract

  • Corneal damage is one of the leading causes of blindness with less than 1 in 70 victims able to undergo a correctional cornea transplant due to global donor shortages; hence, there is a need to develop synthetic alternatives.
  • Sustained delivery of therapeutic molecules to the cornea proves a challenge due to natural defense mechanisms constantly seeking to clear away foreign materials from the eye.
  • The proposed corneal wound sealant seeks to provide a platform for multiple immunomodulatory drugs to be released at different rates to regulate cornea repair.

Third Place Poster

Study of Breast Cancer Cells under Biophysical and Metabolic Cues

Authors: Victoria Santillan, Samerender Nagam Hanumantharao, Stephanie Bule, Carolynn Que, Brennan Vogl, Marina Tanasova, Smitha Rao

Poster Extract

  • Cancer cell reprogramming is a complex process driven by many factors.
  • By culturing cells in 3 dimensional (3D) scaffolds with specific morphologies, we can study how the behavior between cells and protein expression changes.
  • We studied how the scaffolds affected cell-cell interactions and cell-matrix interactions, in the presence of the probe.