In the Biopep group, as well as in the Chemical Engineering department and NC State as a whole, we strive to make one of our most valuable products be the whole person that graduates from their experience here.  An important part of graduate education is leadership through teaching and guiding undergraduate students, and here at the Biopep group we’re no strangers to striving for excellence in every field.

This week, our lab was singularly honored when not just one but two of our graduate students were nominated as part of the 6 finalists for the Praxair Exceptional Teaching Assistant award.

John Schneible, nominated for his work with graduate transport, was asked what his keys to successful teaching are.  In repy, he said, “First, always prepare ahead of time – it’s very important to have an idea of what kinds of questions to expect.  Next, you need to encourage those questions and be friendly; students can be intimidated by teachers, so it helps to be friendly and willing.”

“Teaching is a lot of hard work,” Hannah Reese, who was nominated for her efforts in first semester undergraduate transport, said.  “Balancing time between research, teaching, and keeping yourself sane can be a real challenge.   If you don’t have encouragement from your research professor to do well in teaching, you will have a much harder job – and Dr. Menegatti was really accepting of some of the time I needed to make this a good semester.”

John further agreed, “Manage your time well, and treat your time teaching as very valuable.  It improves working relationships with your students and instills respect for you.”

Most importantly, though, the success to good teaching is to have fun!  Enjoy what you do and let that shine through to your students.

Looks like they pulled it off!  Good luck to Hannah and John as they are considered for the top prize which will be awarded on August 24th.

Our own John Bowen has won the Molecular Biotechnology Training Program (MBTP) fellowship.  As the student of one of the training grant faculty, Mr. Bowen’s qualifications and outstanding work allowed him to be chosen for this program.

The goal of the MBTP is to train students to go beyond their standard training in graduate school to prepare for their careers.  Industrial cooperation is encouraged through a 3-month internship that Mr. Bowen will participate in later in his grad school career.

To find out more about the MBTP through the NCSU Biotechnology Program, you can look at its Graduate Fellowships Page at NCState.  The NIH symbol and information about the NIH came from the NIH website, which can tell you more about how the government agency seeks to improve human health and welfare in the US.

The Art in Science initiative in the Chemical Engineering department here at NC State has been going strong for two years.  As the instigator of the movement, Dr. Menegatti has helped to inject an appreciation of the aesthetically pleasing into the department.  In the coming years, we’ll continue to look forward to the departmental contest and potential growth of the program.

This project is intended to get engineering students to think across subject barriers, as well as to create intriguing images that are accessible to a non-scientist audience.  We hope that the program continues to grow and continues to do more to lessen what oftentimes seems an impassible divide between the humanities and the sciences.

To gain access to more of these pictures or gain more information about the Art in Science initiative, feel free to contact Dr. Menegatti.

For about a decade, industry leader in silica gel technology, Fuji Silysia, has participated with our lab at NC State in collaborative research that has resulted in several papers and great friendships.  This year, we said goodbye to Yuki Ohara of Fuji Silysia in Japan, as he completed his 2-year stay with us.  We are also excited to work with Atsushi, who will join our group later this month to continue performing great research, improve his English skills, and become part of our lab.

Thanks once again to Fuji Silysia for their efforts, collaboration, and for having so many awesome employees that can come work with us!

Our team is working hard to detect a biomarker that indicates heart disease – a real problem with a real solution.  Dr. Menegatti, as one of the advisors on the project, is adding his expertise in protein binding and detection.

Check out this video that came from the SensUs project – our team is featured in it!  The competition will be soon, so stay tuned as we continue to update.

SensUs is a relatively new, international competition with an awesome goal – to find new ways to detect important molecules, including biomolecules.  For the SensUs 2017 competition, Brendan Turner in our lab has been an instrumental part.  We’d like to root him on as the team gets closer to presentation time – definitely expect updates as competition time gets closer!

The SenseNC team is a collaborative project between NC State and UNC Chapel Hill, as well as the only team in the United States to have fulfilled the requirements to compete in 2017.  If you’d like to learn more about SenseNC, either check out the international website, or get in touch with the team’s leader, Mike Wilkins (mwilkin2@ncsu.edu).

The European Patent Office has approved the patent, number EP3004136, filed by Dr. Menegatti for the purification of IgG using peptoid affinity ligands.  We think this is the beginning of an incredible journey with a new set of chemistries, one that will have many of the positive traits of our lab’s traditional expertise with peptides but the added bonuses of chemical stability.  More peptoid work from us is on the horizon as we continue to work on the cutting edge of biotechnology and bioprocessing.

Read more about the patent and the European Union patent office here.

Dr. Menegatti has been selected to speak at the Bio Manufacturing Series in 2017.   He will speak on some of our lab’s progress and innovations in the field of bioseparations and biotechnology to some of the top minds in both the industrial and academic arms of the field.

The conference was conceived to help stimulate collaboration that brings about cutting edge techniques and products.  Innovation is important within the biotechnology industry, and both this conference and our labs are dedicated to making innovation happen.

To find out more and see a list of speakers, look at the Bio Manufacturing conference’s website.

This coming Monday, May 15th, we’ll be going to the Triangle Soft Matter conference at UNC Chapel Hill. Hannah Reese, Camden Cutright, and Radina Lilova will be presenting a poster that represents a collection of our work on soft materials. Dr. Menegatti will also be in attendance. Come check it out and chat with us – interesting collaborations are always sought!

Ashton Lavoie recently presented her work on a straight-through downstream processing technology that she is developing in our lab. The talk was given in the Bioprocessing of the Future symposium to industrial, academic, and regulatory audience. She talked about the removal of host cell proteins from aqueous streams and how her proteomic analysis work is getting us closer to a ligand or series of ligands that could specifically remove impurities from a process stream.

To find out more about the BPD program, feel free to visit the NCBiotech page.