When the National Science Foundation announced the 2016 awardees and honorable mentions for their Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), the University of Oregon Chemistry and Biochemistry Department had plenty of reasons to celebrate. Five University of Oregon chemistry graduate students were among the fellowship award recipients – Micah Donor, Aurora Ginzburg, Mari Saif, Meredith Sharps and Andrea Steiger – and one more grad student, Lisa Eytel, received an honorable mention.  In addition, two UO Chemistry and Biochemistry alumni also received awards, and a third alum received an honorable mention.

The GRFP recognizes and supports outstanding students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited US institutions. For the 2016 competition, NSF received close to 17,000 applications, and made 2,000 award offers. Each Fellow receives a three-year annual stipend of $34,000, along with a $12,000 cost of education allowance for tuition and fees. The program also offers its Fellows opportunities for international research and professional development.

2016 GRFP Award Recipients

Micah Donor is a second year PhD candidate in chemistry, working in the Jim Prell lab. His research uses mass spectrometry in concert with ion mobility, labeling, and gas-phase activation to study protein unfolding and proteins with disordered structures. When combined with molecular dynamics simulations and collisional cross section calculations, these experiments provide insights into protein translocation across biological membranes and enable rapid characterization of intrinsically disordered proteins.

Aurora Ginzburg is also in her second year in the chemistry PhD program, in the Jim Hutchison lab. Her project focuses on the synthesis of multifunction gold nanoparticles for biomedical applications. By incorporating targeting, stabilizing and tagging functionalities, she studies how to tune the properties of nanomaterials. Her aim is to develop gold nanoparticle methodologies that maximize material performance and minimize environmental impacts. Aurora also focuses on nanoparticle toxicology, with an emphasis on implementing complementary characterization techniques to better understand the relationships between structure and toxicity.

Mari Saif graduated from University of Oregon in 2015 with B.S. degree in chemistry.  She worked in the Andrew H. Marcus lab as an undergraduate, where she published a first authored paper on the electronic transition moments of two indole derivatives. She will be receiving her master’s degree in chemistry from the UO this June, and is currently finishing a second paper on the electronic structure of a cyanine dye. Mari will be starting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this coming fall to pursue a PhD in chemistry, and plans to study spectroscopy.

Meredith Sharps is a joint student between the Jim Hutchison and Darren Johnson labs, and in her second year in the chemistry PhD program.  Her research focuses on patterning chemistry of materials for applications that require lithography.  She studies the mechanisms and material properties that affect how cluster-based inorganic resists interact with incident radiation (electrons, photons, and x-rays), and how those interactions can impact the formation of nano and micro-sized features that are found in many of the electronic devices that we use. Currently, Meredith is investigating a system using tin-oxide clusters to probe reaction mechanisms that occur under radiation from extreme ultraviolet light.

Andrea Steiger is a member of the Mike Pluth lab, and a second year PhD candidate in chemistry.  The Pluth lab researches chemical tools for studying biological hydrogen sulfide, which has been implicated in numerous physiological processes. Andrea’s research focuses on the design of triggerable compounds for release of hydrogen sulfide to mimic enzymatic production more closely than most current donation methods. Her work aims to provide access to a tunable and highly controlled strategy for hydrogen sulfide delivery that can be modified appropriately for specific research and therapeutic applications.

2016 GRFP Honorable Mention

 Lisa Eytel is also a second year graduate student in the chemistry PhD program, co-advised by Darren Johnson and Michael Haley. Her research is geared toward understanding how modifications of an anion-binding scaffold affect the method in which a probe reversibly binds an anion. Her lab designs small organic molecules to be used for anion detection for environmental and biological applications.

GRFP Awards and Honors for UO Chemistry and Biochemistry Alumni

Alumni Muhammad Khalifa, B.S. 2014, and Chase Salazar, B.S. 2015, have also been chosen for 2016 NSF Graduate Research Fellowships.  Both are in the chemistry graduate program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Alumna Lindsay Guzman, B.S. 2014, received an honorable mention.  Lindsay is a graduate student in chemistry at the University of Arizona.

– by Leah O’Brien
Chemistry and Biochemistry Department