Daniel Dodd and Jordan Moore, two graduate students of the Gallego-Perez Nanomedicine Lab, will participate in a summer internship opportunity at the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) in the 711th Human Performance Wing at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
This summer, 3rd year PhD student Daniel Dodd will participate in an internship opportunity with the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, as part of the Repperger Research Intern Program. Working under the 711th Human Performance Wing in Dayton, Ohio, Daniel will participate in research related to nucleic acid (NA) structures. The availability of computational tools to optimize the design of complex NA structures and the ability to engineer these structures with functional moieties provides a platform to develop entities that can be programmed to navigate the bloodstream and monitor biomarker signatures in an unsupervised way. In this regard, Daniel will participate in research that aims to identify design rules for robust NA structures maintaining the functionality of biomarker-responsive sensing elements, optimize the navigation capabilities of these nanostructures to avoid clearance and extend their lifetime, and incorporate different performance enhancing cocktails to be released when specific biomarker signatures are detected. The research will be conducted under the supervision of Dr. Jorge Chavez, PhD, who is currently the Molecular Sensing and Physiology Core Research Area Technical Advisor in the Human Systems Directorate in AFRL, and a Principal Investigator leading a group working at the interface of synthetic biology and nanotechnology developing sensing capabilities to monitor different non-medical conditions that affect human performance.
In addition, our 4th year PhD candidate, Jordan Moore, will participate in a summer internship opportunity at the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) under the guidance of Dr. Tyler Nelson and Dr. Matthew Grogg of the 711th Human Performance Wing at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Jordan will participate in research related to lab/organ-on-a-chip and micro-electrode arrays. These microfluidic based platforms enable rapid drug screening and high-throughput in vitro analyses to assess injury and repair in culture. Jordan will participate in research studying the gut and lung organoids as well as axonal transport. This opportunity affords Jordan a space to gain exposure to new areas of research and grow skills essential to his career endeavors as a future faculty member.