At the end of last semester we welcomed our new chemistry grad students, Kara Zeman, Trey Pittman, and Eli Barstis. We are looking forward to getting to know them better as they start their projects in the lab.

We have another Ph.D. in the group! Dr. Cody Carrell defended his dissertation “Improving Sensors for Pathogen Detection at the Point-of-Need” last week via Teams. He’ll be sticking around for another few months to work on COVID diagnostics.

Congratulations to Kate and Jeremy who have passed their preliminary exam this summer and are now officially Ph.D. candidates. Brandaise passed her literature seminar presentation last week as well. All are relieved to be finished!

The Henry Lab has had a few teams working on COVID-related research for the past few months. One of the devices has been successful and was licensed to Quara Devices, a startup company specializing in diagnostic biosensors.

See below for links to a few news articles and interviews:

Research team inks licensing deal for COVID-19 viral detection test

KOA News Radio – Interview with Dr. Brian Geiss

Denver CBS Local – featuring Drs. Chuck Henry, Brian Geiss, and David Dandy

Alec Richardson, one of our engineering students, recently defended his Master’s thesis “Design and Evaluation of an Instrumented Microfluidic Organotypic Device and Sensor Module for Organ-on-a-chip Applications.” We will miss him in the lab and wish him luck for the future!

We have another Ph.D. in our group! Dr. Alyssa Kava recently defended her dissertation on electrochemical devices for environmental analyses. We will miss her around the lab!

Congrats to Dr. Eka Noviana who defended her thesis “Development of Paper-Based Devices for Point-of-Need Bioanalytical Applications” over Zoom a few weeks ago. She has returned to Indonesia with a faculty position at Universitas Gadjah Mada. We will miss her greatly!

Across the lab, we represent a few different winter activities. A few weeks ago, a group of us went skiing up at Snowy Range in Wyoming and also ice fishing!

While the lab has been remote for the past few weeks, we are still keeping up our group meetings – virtually. Unfortunately that also means we can’t go out to lunch together for the time being. One of our post docs, Tugba, has to return to Turkey so we had a virtual lunch today to say goodbye. We will miss you!

Congratulations to Kaylee for winning the Vice President for Research’s 3 Minute Challenge and becoming part of the next cohort fo VPR Graduate Fellows. Click the link below to see her winning presentation:

3 Minute Challenge winners become 2020-21 research fellows