Author: Girgis Obaid

W’re overjoyed to celebrate Dr. Chanda Bhandari today for completing her PhD Dissertation Defense! Chanda is the first student to complete her PhD from the Obaid mION Lab at the Department of Bioengineering – UT Dallas. Her work focused on developing novel light-responsive nanoformulations for manipulating the tumor microenvironment in Head & Neck Cancer and Pancreatic cancer to improve image-guided surgery and chemo-immunotherapy!!

Congratulations Chanda – we’re immensely proud of your hard work and passion!!

Thanks to the tremendous support of her Dissertation Committee Members Dr. Sabrina Oliveira, Dr. Imran Rizvi, Dr. Caroline Jones and Dr. Jacopo Ferruzzi, and all collaborators and lab members past and present!

Congrats to our awesome undergraduate student Taksheel Aileni who won second place for his poster at the Third Annual Workshop on Imaging and Data Science!! Thank you to Dr. Baowei Fei and UTD Bioengineering for such a fantastic workshop!

We’re so proud of our 4 summer research students – every one of them got an award at the Summer Platform for Undergraduate Research (SPUR)!! Congrats ⁠Meghana Sree Vadlamudi (Office of Graduate Education Award), ⁠Arden Mercy Peterson (Office of Research Award), ⁠Diego Rascon and Taksheel Rao Aileni (Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science Award)!! What an amazing group!! 

Check out the recording of Dr. Obaid’s presentation for a JBO Hot Topics Webinar on Advanced Technologies in Photodynamic Therapy!

https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/jbo-hot-topics-webinar-series#=

In the quietness of the 2023-2024 winter break, our two awesome undergraduate students Azophi Moffat (left) and John Fakhry (right) graduated! Congratulations to you both! You will be missed!

Congratulations to our undergraduate student researcher Micah – his research proposal was selected for the 2024 Undergraduate Research Scholar Award (URSA)!! He will get a research award, lab cost support, and the opportunity to compete at URSA 2024 poster contest! Very proud of Micah! 

Micah’s research focuses on antibody conjugates for photodynamic therapy and photoimmunotherapy.

Our PhD student Nimit Shah receives a UT Dallas Bioengineering Convergence Grant to support his research on lipid nanostructure for photodynamic priming of tumor tissue. Congratulations, Nimit!!

Undergraduate student Max Quaye wins second place at the Biengineering Undergraduate Research Poster Competition, where Doha and Micah also presented their work!!

Introducing Austin Nguyen as the newest PhD candidate to the Obaid mION Lab at UT Dallas Bioengineering! Austin will be working with Dr. Girgis Obaid on antibody-chromophore conjugates for light-triggered tissue modulation. Welcome to the team Austin!! Very excited to have you on board!