Sprenger

Six chemical and biological engineering students earn major NSF fellowships

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 07:56:06 +0000

Six chemical and biological engineering students earn major NSF fellowships Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/05/2024 - 01:56

Susan Glairon

Five chemical and biological engineering graduate students and one ChBE undergraduate student have received 2024 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships, a prestigious award that recognizes and supports outstanding students in a wide variety of science-related disciplines. This year the NSF awarded 27 University of Colorado Boulder students, including 18 from the College of Engineering and Applied Science, with the graduate research fellowship.

Fellows receive a three-year annual stipend of $37,000 and full coverage of tuition, fees and insurance, along with opportunities for international research and professional development that span five years.

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CU Boulder researchers tackle HIV-related cognitive decline

Anonymous — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 21:18:40 +0000

CU Boulder researchers tackle HIV-related cognitive decline Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/05/2024 - 14:18

Susan Glairon

Assistant Professor Kayla Sprenger

Assistant Professors Kayla Sprenger and Laurel Hind, of CU Boulder’s Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, are on a collaborative mission to explore solutions for mitigating cognitive decline in individuals living with HIV. This decline can be caused by both the virus itself and the antiretroviral (ARV) drugs used to treat it.

“We're thrilled that this collaborative research is finally happening,” Sprenger said. “It's exciting to work on this together.”

The two secured a $396,000, two-year National Institutes of Health R21 grant to uncover the features of ARVs that impact their interactions with efflux proteins (which remove substances like medications from cells) and lipids in the blood-brain barrier. This knowledge is poised to revolutionize the design of new ARVs, endowing them with an enhanced ability to cross the blood-brain barrier and effectively combat HIV infection in the brain, Sprenger said.

Assistant Professor Laurel Hind

ARVs work by hindering the ability of HIV to replicate. Despite their effectiveness in controlling the virus, 50 to 60 percent of the aging HIV population experiences some form of neurocognitive decline, partly attributed to the treatment, she added.

“ARVs play a crucial role in extending the life expectancy of individuals living with HIV,” Sprenger said. “However, they are accompanied by adverse effects, notably inhibition of host cell proteins that causes neurological impairment. If we can design better ARVs that not only mitigate these side effects but also address neurological complications arising from the presence of HIV itself within the brain, it's like a double whammy of goodness.”

Their research seeks to identify the molecular mechanisms by which ARVs transport across the blood-brain barrier—a critical investigation given the barrier’s role in safeguarding the brain by removing harmful substances, paradoxically including life-saving drugs like ARVs. Beginning with the evaluation of existing ARVs, their approach involves computationally modeling how these drugs diffuse across the blood-brain barrier.

The interdisciplinary project merges Hind’s experimental expertise with Sprenger’s computational approaches. Sprenger has long aspired to conduct computational analyses on how ARVs enter the brain, but has faced challenges in obtaining adequate data. Recognizing this need, Hind provided a model capable of generating experimental data, enabling the collective advance of this research. The experimental data, derived from Hind’s microfluidic blood-brain barrier model, will be crucial in establishing parameters for the development of more biologically-informed computational models.

“Obtaining ‘good data’ has proven challenging due to a scarcity of human data and the limitations inherent in animal models,” Hind said. To address this, the researchers are utilizing a cutting-edge approach, featuring human brain cells within a physiologically-relevant microfluidic model. This approach aims to more accurately replicate the physiological conditions of the blood-brain barrier in their experimental model.

Their ultimate goal is to design new ARVs that can prevent HIV from entering the brain or have an improved ability to diffuse across the blood-brain barrier to stop HIV from replicating within brain-resident cells, all while ensuring that the drug itself doesn’t cause neuronal damage.

Assistant Professors Kayla Sprenger and Laurel Hind are on a collaborative mission to explore solutions for mitigating cognitive decline in individuals living with HIV. This decline can be caused by both the virus itself and the antiretroviral drugs used to treat it.

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CU Boulder researchers tackle HIV-related cognitive decline

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Kayla Sprenger awarded RIO's Outstanding Partner Award

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 14:11:38 +0000

Kayla Sprenger awarded RIO's Outstanding Partner Award Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/19/2023 - 08:11

Assistant Professor Kayla Sprenger has been honored with the 2023 Outstanding Partner Award from CU Boulder's Research & Innovation Office (RIO).

The RIO Outstanding Partner Award is an annual honor presented to a campus employee who embodies a deep commitment to partnership and collaboration with RIO. It is conferred upon campus employees who foster relationships and promote a culture of collaboration within RIO units.

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Two ChBE professors selected for prestigious AICHE “35 Under 35” award

Anonymous — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 19:52:42 +0000

Two ChBE professors selected for prestigious AICHE “35 Under 35” award Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/10/2023 - 13:52

Susan Glairon

Two CU Boulder faculty members from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering were recently selected for the prestigious “35 Under 35” awards from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

Assistant Professors Kayla Sprenger and Ankur Gupta have been recognized by AIChE as two of the 35 outstanding chemical engineering professionals under the age of 35. The 2023 award celebrates their significant contributions to the field as well as to AIChE, and acknowledges them as role models and innovators “who will pave the way for future generations.”

Gupta’s research group studies interfacial phenomena, including electrochemical interfaces, colloidal motion, and microhydrodynamics for applications in energy storage, desalination and lab-on-a-chip technologies. He and his group aspire to delve into the design of porous electrodes using electrolyte transport phenomena, with the goal of advancing energy storage technologies.

“Being selected by the AIChE for the 35 under 35 award is an incredible honor, not just for me, but for my entire research group," Gupta said. "It's a recognition of the effort that's gone into our research on the broad and vital topic of electrochemical interfaces and colloidal physics for energy and environmental applications. This award serves as a motivation to continue pushing the frontiers of chemical engineering, and I'm deeply grateful for this acknowledgement.”

Sprenger’s lab focuses on multi-scale computational approaches to design immunotherapeutics against a wide variety of infectious and neurological diseases. She hopes to publish and establish her lab’s research in the areas of computational immunology and machine learning-driven vaccine design.

"It means so much to me to be selected by the AIChE for the 35 Under 35 award," Sprenger said. "My research is highly multidisciplinary, incorporating elements from physics, (bio)chemistry, neuroscience and immunology. Despite this breadth, my lab's approach to solving problems in these realms is deeply rooted in applying engineering-based principles. To me, then, this award is a reflection of this fact, as well as a nice nod to my continued commitment to the broader chemical engineering community."

The two will be honored at a Nov. 6 reception for alumni and friends at the 2023 AIChE annual meeting in Orlando, Florida.

You can read more about the award winners here.

Assistant Professors Kayla Sprenger and Ankur Gupta were selected for the prestigious AICHE “35 Under 35” award.

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Emily Rhodes awarded Teets Fellowship

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 15:53:15 +0000

Emily Rhodes awarded Teets Fellowship Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 07/19/2023 - 09:53 Susan Glairon

The dean’s office of CU Boulder's College of Engineering and Applied Science has chosen PhD student Emily Rhodes as the recipient of The Teets Family Endowment in Nano-Technology Graduate Fellowship for the 2022-2023 academic year.

Established in 2002 with a generous donation from Peter Teets, The Teets Fellowship aims to support outstanding graduate students conducting research related to micro/nano systems in engineering and life sciences. The fellowship provides $15,000 per year from September 2023 to August 2025.

Rhodes is a member of the Sprenger Group. The fellowship will be awarded beginning in fall 2023.

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Two chemical and biological engineering professors receive AB Nexus awards

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 22:09:16 +0000

Two chemical and biological engineering professors receive AB Nexus awards Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/12/2023 - 16:09

Two professors from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering were recently honored with AB Nexus Awards, which aim to foster interdisciplinary research collaborations between CU Anschutz and CU Boulder.

Under the program, ChBE Associate Professor Anushree Chatterjee is partnering with with Assistant Professor Lakshmi Chauhan (infectious diseases, CU Anschutz) to develop a high-throughput and accelerated antibiotic susceptibility testing method. ChBE Assistant Professor Kayla Sprenger is collaborating with Assistant Professor Kimberley Bruce (endocrinology, metabolism and diabetes, CU Anschutz) to investigate specialized immune cells in the brain known as microglia and explore whether targeting the lipid metabolism process could mitigate the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.

The spring 2023 round of AB Nexus awards has allocated nearly $825,000 across 11 teams, consisting of seven new collaborations and four projects that expand upon existing collaborations. This funding includes support from co-sponsors, including a $10,000 contribution from CU Boulder’s Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering.

Since its launch nearly three years ago as a pilot project, AB Nexus along with its co-sponsors has awarded more than $3 million in grant funding to 48 intercampus teams. The program has also positioned both campuses for success in securing additional external funding – particularly for grants that prioritize team-based research.

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Video: How Kayla Sprenger Uses Computational Tools in Energy and Health Research

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 19:38:28 +0000

Video: How Kayla Sprenger Uses Computational Tools in Energy and Health Research Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/28/2023 - 13:38

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Faculty collaboration earns $2M NSF award for post-consumer plastic waste research

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Oct 2021 16:09:19 +0000

Faculty collaboration earns $2M NSF award for post-consumer plastic waste research Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/25/2021 - 10:09

Jonathan Raab

Single use plastics represent an environmental challenge that researchers at the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering hope to address.

The proliferation of plastic products has created an environmental challenge: what should be done with unusable, discarded plastic waste that can harm the environment? Faculty from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering are working on a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project, Hydrogenolysis for Upcycling of Polyesters and Mixed Plastics, to address this serious environmental issue.

Denver Business Challenge Endowed Professor Will Medlin, James and Catherine Patten Endowed Professor Ryan Hayward, Assistant Professor Kayla Sprenger, Professor Michael Toney and their respective groups are collaborating on this project, which the NSF is funding through a $2 million grant.

“Figuring out how to deal with post-consumer plastic waste is a major societal problem,” Medlin said. “We were all independently interested in working on this problem, but were approaching it from different angles. Ryan is an expert on how plastics are formed and could be degraded, Mike is an expert on developing experimental tools to understand the interfaces between materials that arise in chemical upcycling of plastics, Kayla is an expert on computational modeling studies of similar interfaces and my group works on catalysts for depolymerization.”

Given the complexity of the problem, the researchers decided to combine their diverse yet complementary approaches to address problems in chemical upcycling. The Medlin group has been working on the conversion of biomass-derived polymers to renewable products for the last several years.

“Although plant-made polymers are certainly different from man-made plastics, some of the essential catalyst processes are quite similar,” Medlin said. “You’re trying to break apart a macromolecule into specific units that can be made into useful products. Extending our work to plastics upcycling made sense based on the group's general focus, and students are highly motivated to work on this critical environmental problem.”

The Hayward group will work on characterizing how the polymers in question are catalytically deconstructed — specifically how the polymers interact with the catalyst support surfaces and how the polymer chain lengths evolve as the reactions proceed.

“Enabling a shift to a more sustainable use of polymers, where the vast majority are recycled or converted to higher value products rather than being discarded after a single use is one of the most important challenges facing materials scientists today,” Hayward said. “We were very excited about the opportunity to join this team and to be able to work towards a very promising route toward deconstructing polymers into high value products.”

Toney said that his group will contribute research that focuses on the interfacial interactions between the catalyst, support and polymers as they react. This will require the development of new 'operando' experimental tools to observe the reactions in real-time.

“My research is largely motivated by helping to solve the sustainability challenges facing humanity by helping to develop new materials and processes,” Toney said. “Eliminating plastic waste is one such challenge perhaps most popularly seen by reports of ‘The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.’ This is my first research effort aimed at helping the team develop more effective methods to eliminate plastic waste.”

Medlin also credited Adjoint Professor Gregg Beckham as being a key part of the team. Beckham, who also works at NREL, will be contributing his expertise in plastics upcycling and conducting technoeconomic analyses of the processes the collaboration develops. Professor Andreas Heyden from the University of South Carolina will also conduct quantum mechanical simulations to understand the atomic-scale interactions between plastics and active catalysts, which will complement the Sprenger group’s efforts.

This grant was funded through the NSF Directorate for Engineering’s Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation program.

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Alumni Webinar Series: A Seemingly Unstoppable Virus: Can Humanity Ever Overcome HIV?

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 17:47:15 +0000

Alumni Webinar Series: A Seemingly Unstoppable Virus: Can Humanity Ever Overcome HIV? Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/08/2021 - 11:47

Oct 20, 2021 12:00 PM in Mountain Time (US and Canada)

No universal vaccines exist for infectious diseases like HIV and influenza, largely due to the high frequency with which the pathogens that cause these diseases acquire mutations in their surface proteins. Hear from Assistant Professor Kayla Sprenger as she describes our efforts to address this challenge for HIV using a variety of computational methods that include homology modeling, molecular simulations, mathematical modeling, and machine learning.

During the webinar, Dr. Sprenger will present on our efforts to understand, on a molecular level, how HIV is able to ‘escape’ from existing, best-of-class antibodies called broadly neutralizing antibodies, or bnAbs. She will share a feature of the work happening at CU Boulder to glean fundamental insight into vaccine design principles for eliciting such bnAbs using a coarse-grained mathematical model. Finally, she will showcase our efforts to develop a more realistic model of the antibody evolution process, enabling the design of real, HIV-like vaccine-candidate protein sequences with an optimized ability to elicit bnAbs.

Kayla Sprenger is an Assistant Professor in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department and a faculty member in the new Biomedical Engineering Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Sprenger received her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 2017 from the University of Washington Seattle. Her Ph.D. was focused on the development and use of molecular simulation tools to study the structure and function of biomolecules at interfaces. She completed her postdoctoral studies in 2020 at MIT in the Institute for Medical Engineering & Science, focusing on developing agent-based models of stochastic biological processes to enable vaccine design against highly mutable pathogens like HIV and influenza. Her lab at CU Boulder is now focused on multiscale computational approaches to design immunotherapeutics against a variety of infectious and neurological diseases. She is passionate about promoting the participation of women and other underrepresented minorities in STEM.

Contact the Alumni Engagement Team at EngAlumni@colorado.edu with any questions.

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