Graduate students win national and departmental awards

Awards from the American Institute of Chemists and departmental awards for research were among the awards won by graduate students in the William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering this spring.

AIC Awards

Dr. Ruizhi Pang (advisor: Winston Ho) received the American Institute of Chemists' Outstanding Postdoc Award from the American Institute of Chemists. His research focuses on the development of innovative membranes for carbon dioxide capture.

Dhruba Jyoti Deka, who just successfully defended his PhD thesis, received the American Institute of Chemists' Outstanding Graduate Student Award.  Dr. Deka's advisor was Professor Umit Ozkan.

The AIC Student Award Program honors outstanding seniors, post-baccalaureate, and post-doctoral students majoring in chemistry, chemical engineering or biochemistry. The awards are given in recognition of a demonstrated ability, leadership, and professional promise. Candidates are chosen and nominated by their faculty members.

AIC Award recipients receive a number of benefits. These include: a certificate from AIC, suitable for framing; a Student Affiliate membership in the AIC good through December 31, 2021; a subscription to The Chemist, the AIC online peer-reviewed journal; the student's name included on a listing on the AIC website; access to the AIC website; an opportunity to enroll in AIC's certification program for chemical scientists and engineers; participation in regional and national meetings; and an opportunity to network with other chemical professionals.

CBE Department Awards and Other Honors

At the department level, Dr. Jenifer Gomez Pastora (advisor: Jeffrey Chalmers) received the CBE Outstanding Postdoc Award. Dr. Gomez Pastora's research focuses on blood cell magnetic separation and characterization, as well as the optimization of separation processes for superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles. She recently received the research award Consejo Social Juan María Parés for the best dissertation in the field of Engineering and Technology at the University of Cantabria.

In addition, six students won the CBE Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award:

• Pengfei Jiang (shown above with advisor: Katelyn Swindle-Reilly). Pengfei is developing a sustained drug delivery for treatment of age-related macular degeneration for improved patient comfort and compliance. (see below)
• James Kim (advisor: Jeffrey Chalmers)
• Fanhe (Frank) Kong (advisor: L.-S. Fan). Frank's research involves developing various chemical looping technologiesmfor increased energy efficiency (more info below).
• Kyuha Lee (advisor: Bhavik Bakshi). Kyuha's research focus is sustainable process and supply chain design considering the food-energy-water nexus, economic constraints, and climate change.
• Fengli Zhang (advisor: Shang-Tian Yang). Fengli's research focus is embryotoxicity prediction of drugs based on integrated embryonic stem cell test and machine learning.
• Changlong Zou (advisor: Li-Chiang Lin and Winston Ho)

Pengfei Jiang was selected as a 2020 finalist in the Ohio State University Office of Research's Innovator of the Year - Next Generation competition.

In addition, her research was featured on the cover of the Journal of Controlled Release.

Her research group developed a sustained drug delivery device for treating age-related macular degeneration, also known as AMD. AMD is one of the most common ocular diseases which occurs in people over 60. To prevent blindness, patients receive an injection of protein therapeutics directly into their eyes on a monthly basis. 

This frequent intravitreal injection could reduce patient compliance and is associated with some severe complications. Therefore, Jiang and her co-researchers developed a device which can extend the protein therapeutic release period by up to one year, thereby reducing injection frequency and further alleviating patient discomfort while increasing treatment compliance.

Last year, Jiang won the STAR (Student Travel Achievement Recognition) Award from the Society for Biomaterials for her work on ocular drug delivery.

Frank (Fanhe) Kong’s research was recently featured on the front cover of Chemical Engineering & Processing: Process Intensification, 2019 Special Issuein Honor of Professor Robert Langer’s 70th Birthday. Kong's research group is developing the chemical looping technology, which is a versatile technology platform applied to the conversion of fossil fuels and bioenergy into chemicals or electricity with improved energy efficiency and mitigated CO₂ emissions. His research focuses on the process simulation, exergy analysis and life cycle assessment of various chemical looping processes to analyze and optimize the process performance in order to guide the design and construction of practical chemical looping plants.

Congratulations to all on being recognized for your hard work and accomplishments!