BMES 2023!

The Pompano Lab had a great time in Seattle this year! Everyone enjoyed catching up with old colleagues and meeting new people. Here were the talk titles:

Tochi: Mitigating reactive oxygen species production and increasing gel porosity improves cell viability and spreading in photocrosslinked gelatin-thiol hydrogels

Sophie: A 3D-printed multi-organ-on-chip platform to model brain-immune interactions in neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration

Katerina: Breast cancer cells chemotact to specific regions of lymph node in an ex vivo model of lymph node metastasis

Jon: Building a microphysiological model of the human lymph node follicle border zone

Professor Pompano and Parris Present at Pittcon!

Parris Anbaei and Prof. Pompano travelled to Philadelphia for the first in-person Pittcon since 2020. We had a great time catching up with colleagues, and getting feedback on our research after two invited talks. Prof. Pompano presented in a symposium organized by lab alumna, Prof. Ashley Ross (Univ. Cincinnati), and Parris presented in a session organized by Sally Gowers from the Boutelle lab (Imperial College, UK).

Pompano Lab at MicroTAS 2022

The Pompano Lab had a great time at MicroTAS 2022, held in China, October 23-27, 2022. We attended virtually and were very proud of Sophie Cook's midnight oral presentation, and Hannah Musgrove's poster on Monday. Prof. Pompano was the Co-Chair of the Weekend Workshop series, a series of eight tutorial workshops with approximately 24 speakers from around the world. These were a pleasure to see go off smoothly, and the participants learned so much from our experts.

Prof. Pompano speaks at UVA Child's Health Research Center

It was a pleasure to discuss our research with physicians and researchers working on children's health, including pediatric oncology, respiratory diseases including COVID, and others. Looking forward to setting up new collaborations to make a difference for these patients!

Chemistry Alumni Open House events

The Pompano lab was delighted to meet alumni from the Department of Chemistry, ranging from recent grads to folks who graduated 50 years ago. PhD student Sophie Cook presented a poster at the research fair, and Hannah Musgrove ran a booth about the Chemistry Science Communications booth. Later, Sophie led tours of our lab for interested alumni! Thanks all for visiting, and please let us know if you would like more information about our research.

Prof. Pompano Chairs the inaugural Immunoengineering GRC

Prof. Pompano was honored to Co-Chair the meeting with co-chair Bali Pulendran and vice chairs Susan N. Thomas and Madhav Dhodapkar. Tochi and Katerina both presented their research in posters. This was great time and opportunity to connect with this growing community!

Parris Anbaei wins 3rd place in Chemistry Rising 5th year Poster session

Big congratulations to Parris for her wonderful presentation! Good job also to Sophie Cook and Jon Zatorski for their excellent presentations in the 4th year session!

Dr. Pompano presents keynote at MRS symposium

MRS 2020: On December 2, 2020, Dr. Pompano presented one of two live keynote talks in the symposium, “Biomaterials for Studying and Controlling the Immune System,” organized by Evan Scott, Kara Spiller, Eric Appel, and Derfogail Delcassian. The talk was followed by a thought-provoking panel discussion on the role of biomaterials in directing immunity, particularly for COVID-19 vaccination and against autoimmune diseases, with Joel Collier, Ben Keselowsky, Lonnie Shea, Ankur Singh, and Chris Jewell.

Presentations at MicroTAS and BMES

The Pompano lab was out in force at the virtual MicroTAS 2020, with the majority of the group attending. PhD student Sophie Cook presented her poster on a modular micro-culture system with a novel media pump. Prof. Pompano presented in the pre-conference workshop on Organs-on-Chip, with a tutorial on incorporating tissue and immune functions into microphysiological systems. Plus she had fun as a poster judge!

The next week, PhD student Megan Catterton presented a virtual on-demand talk at virtual BMES 2020. She spoke on her and undergraduate Tim Freeman’s work measuring diffusion through inflamed lymph nodes.

Congrats to everyone for their involvement! We look forward to returning to these conferences in person next year.

Meg at BMES 2020

Sophie at MicroTAS 2020

Congrats Andrew Kinman, PhD, & Austin Dunn, MS

July was an eventful month for the Pompano lab, with two defenses and graduations!

First, Andrew Kinman successfully defended his dissertation and earned his PhD, then stayed a few more weeks to wrap up and pass on his projects to Pargat Singh. His excellent presentation was titled, “Modification and Application of Antibodies and Their Fragments for Immunostaining in Live Lymphatic Tissue Slices.”

Next, Austin Dunn defended his Master’s thesis and earned his MS degree! Look for his paper coming soon on his exciting project, “Spatially Resolved Measurement of Dynamic Glucose Uptake in Live Ex Vivo Tissues”.