Recent News

Glen DSouza, a third-year PhD student supervised by Drs. Madhumita Ray, Anand Prakash, and Chunbao Xu, was awarded first place at the 3 Minute Thesis (3MT) competition during the AIChE Annual Meeting 2023 in Orlando, Florida. The preliminary round for the competition was held in June through video submission, and Glen was chosen from among the top 12 finalists to present at the conference. The winning 3MT talk was based on his PhD thesis, exploring the boundless possibilities of forest waste-based foams in diverse applications such as hydroponics, floral arrangements, and environmental remediation

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Dr. Kibret Mequanint received $250,000 funding from the New Frontier Research Fund (NFRF) – Exploration for a project titled “Anti-epileptic drug chronotherapy: A single once-a-day capsule/tablet delivering variable doses to match the time of seizure peaks.” According to Canada’s Tri-agency Institutional Programs Secretariat, the objective of the NFRF-Exploration program is to support high risk, high reward and interdisciplinary research. It seeks to inspire projects that bring disciplines together beyond traditional disciplinary or common interdisciplinary approaches by research teams with the capacity to explore something new that might fail, but has the potential for significant impact.

Dr. Kibret Mequanint also received $300,000 funding from the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada for a project titled “Clinically relevant engineered human vascular tissues to study disease and therapy.” This research aims to engineer human arteries to study the causes of artery hardening and artery-clogging diseases and how to prevent or treat them. The engineered tissues in this project will also be interrogated if they can be used to test new cardiovascular drugs. The study will permit scientists and clinicians to have a better understanding of vascular disease causes and treatment options.