Dr. Jovana Veselinović is the 2022 recipient of the College of Engineering's Zuhair A. Munir Award for best doctoral dissertation. She conducted groundbreaking interdisciplinary work on using nanoporous gold to detect biomarkers of disease while falling in love with Davis. She is the third straight chemical engineer to receive the honor.
Chemical Engineering Distinguished Professor Karen McDonald was honored for her outstanding contributions to the field of biochemical engineering with the 2022 Daniel I.C. Wang Award from the American Chemical Society’s Division of Biochemical Technology (ACS BIOT) and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ Society of Biological Engineering (AIChE/SBE).
Blood and cerebrospinal fluid flow are important transport processes in the brain that occur mostly in capillaries with a diameter of 5-8 micrometers, the smallest blood vessel in the brain. To microfluidic researchers like Chemical Engineering Associate Professor Jiandi Wan, this is an opportunity to play a significant role in discovering how the brain works.
UC Davis Design and Construction Management announced that Broward Builders has been awarded the contract to design and renovate the new UC Davis Coffee Center. Their $4.5M design builds upon the university’s existing space, a 6,000-square-foot, multi-bay laboratory facility where students and researchers explore the science of coffee from seed to cup.
In high school, fourth-year biochemical engineering major Stephan Alfaro never could have seen himself as a biochemical engineer, but through lab experience, mentorship and taking advantage of resources at UC Davis, he fell in love with the field and looks forward to making a difference.
A research position for a Post-Doctoral Researcher is immediately available at the McDonald- Nandi laboratory (http://mcdonald-nandi.ech.ucdavis.edu), Department of Chemical Engineering, University of California, Davis to work on the project entitled “Scalable Plant-Based Production of Affordable Protein Drugs”. This goal of this project is to transiently express, measure, and characterize recombinant Alpha 1 Antitrypsin (AAT) protein made in Nicotiana benthamiana.
UC Davis Medals will be presented this spring to two alumni couples — Jacque and Wayne Bartholomew, and Pam Rohrich and Karl Gerdes — each pair having met as students and committing not only to each other but their alma mater.
The UC Davis Medal recognizes “extraordinary contributions that embody the campus’ Vision of Excellence.” Winners inspire and support the success of students, faculty, staff and alumni, and foster a bold and innovative spirit in teaching, research and public service.
The Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Davis invites applications for a temporary instructor to teach ECH 158C "Plant Design Project." This is a 4-unit course taught in Spring with an anticipated enrollment of 30 - 40 students. This course is taught in separate sections each with a distinct instructor and design project. Collaboration between instructors is an elemental part of the teaching effort.
Astronauts might one day grow and eat genetically modified plants to ward off disease associated with long spaceflights. Researchers at the College of Engineering have developed a transgenic, or genetically modified, lettuce producing a drug to protect against bone density loss in microgravity. Kevin Yates, a graduate student working with Professor Karen McDonald and Adjunct Professor Somen Nandi at the UC Davis Department of Chemical Engineering, developed the lettuce that expresses a fusion protein combining PTH with part of a human antibody protein. The fusion protein is designed to be stable in the bloodstream and to allow astronauts to potentially purify the drug from plant extracts, Nandi said.
Dr. David Block, Ernest Gallo Endowed Chair of Viticulture and Enology and Professor of Chemical Engineering at University of California, Davis, speaks with The Sweaty Penguin, a PBS-sponsored podcast about climate change. The episode, titled "Lab-Grown Meat: Future Climate Solution or Icky Science Experiment?" explores how lab-grown meat is made, what the barriers are, and how the industry could overcome them.
