Joan Llabre, Ph.D. '23, who received her doctorate in biomedical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute this past fall and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute, has won the Koerner Family Foundation Fellowship, which supports engineers pursuing careers in research. 

This year, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers will begin work on a radically new approach to treating and preventing genetic diseases such as Alzheimer’s.It’s thanks to a grant from the National Institutes of Health’s TARGETED Challenge, which funds scientific research on ways to deliver gene editing tools directly to cells in the human body. 

For the first time, researchers have used bacteria to “upcycle” waste polyethylene

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute doctoral student Lucas Bowman Sutton has been selected as one of 60 recipients of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) award. The SCGSR prepares graduate students for science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) careers that are critical to the DOE Office of Science mission. Thanks to the award, Sutton will spend 12 months at Oak Ridge National Laboratory conducting research on the circadian clock.

With daylight savings time ending soon, we anticipate a change in the timing of daylight hours with the sunrise occurring earlier in the morning. Already, too many of us get far too little sleep, and disruptions to our circadian cycles like those caused by daylight savings time transitions may make us feel more than tired and out of whack. In the end, there is significant medical data that shows that sudden day/night-time changes may even make us sick.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Steven Cramer, William Weightman Walker Professor of Polymer Engineering, and Todd Przybycien, professor of chemical and biological engineering, will contribute to a three-year research program led by faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that aims to design the world’s first fully integrated, continuous mRNA manufacturing platform. Both Cramer and Przybycien are members of Rensselaer’s Shirley Ann Jackson, Ph.D. Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies. The platform is part of an $82 million effort funded by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.

A team of researchers led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Jonathan S. Dordick, Ph.D., Institute Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, has illuminated a new possibility for the treatment and prevention of COVID-19 in research published in Communications Biology.

Just as space holds infinite mysteries, when we zoom in at the level of biomolecules (one trillion times smaller than a meter), there is still so much to learn. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Catherine Royer, Constellation Chair Professor of Bioinformatics and Biocomputation at the Shirley Ann Jackson, Ph.D. Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS) and professor of biological sciences, is dedicated to understanding the conformational landscapes of biomolecules and how they modulate cell function. When biomolecules receive certain inputs, it can cause the atoms to rearrange and the biomolecule to change shape. This change in shape affects their function in cells, so understanding conformational dynamics is critical for drug development.

It is a scary fact that one in two women and one in three men in the United States will develop some form of cancer in their lifetime. One of the hallmarks of many cancers is the occurrence of errors during the cell division process called mitosis. Therefore, critical to enhancing treatments or perhaps even finding a cure for cancer and other diseases, is developing a better understanding of how mitosis works in both healthy and diseased cells.