Postdoctoral Research Associate joins our team Heading link
January 2024 – Kate Kazmer (PhD, Environmental Engineering) joins our lab as a Postdoctoral Research Associate and brings with her expertise in wastewater-based epidemiology. Welcome Kate 🙂
NIH’s Quantum Computing Heading link
December 2024 – PI Stabryla attended NIH’s Quantum Computing: New Frontiers in Biomedical Research Innovation Lab (another weeklong, immersive and interactive experience designed to catalyze creative thinking) to explore exciting new ideas and foster meaningful partnerships around the topic of using quantum computing in biomedical research. Participants discussed applications of quantum computing, brainstormed exciting new possibilities in biomedical research enabled by quantum computing, and formed interdisciplinary teams amongst international experts from quantum computing, engineering, bioinformatics, and biomedical research fields. Teams formally presented their developed use case of quantum computing applied to a real-world biomedical research problem and prepared a short accompany report that could be shaped into a future research proposal, which culminated in our team being selected to receive a cash prize award.
AI in developing next-generation, nano-enabled antimicrobials Heading link
October 2024 – The RENAISSANCE team received their first seed grant from the IEHDSR to explore the use of AI in developing next-generation, nano-enabled antimicrobials to fight drug-resistant bacteria. We are super excited to start work on this important clinical and public health issue using the exciting advances in AI and machine learning! Press: Institute for Equitable Health Data Science Research announces seed grant awardees exploring AI use in healthcare | Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research | University of Illinois Chicago.
Visit to Institute for Equitable Health Data Science Research Heading link
August 2024 – PI Stabryla attended the inaugural Institute for Equitable Health Data Science Research (IEHDSR) bootcamp at UIC. She and other participants across UIC’s campus participated in an intensive, weeklong, grant writing bootcamp that taught team science principles, introduced the NIH funding landscape, and facilitated the formation of cross-disciplinary collaborations across data science, computing, and healthcare fields. Each team went through rigorous rounds of refining their ideas through delivery of short pitches to the group and culminated in submittal of a seed grant proposal on their idea. This bootcamp specifically served as the incubator for the RENAISSANCE collaboration, with PI Stabryla as lead and Co-PIs William Ackerman (College of Medicine, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology), Jida Huang (College of Engineering, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering), and Kyunghee Han (College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science). IEHDSR was launched in February 2024 and aims to bridge data science and computing research on campus with healthcare research, uniting researchers from several colleges across UIC in a new effort to maximize the potential of using data science and computing, including AI, in medical research and care, and to ensure that medical applications of new technologies benefit all populations without bias.
First PhD student Heading link
August 2024 – The Stabryla lab welcomes Houman Nikman as the lab’s first PhD student. Houman will be pursuing a PhD in Materials Engineering. Welcome to the lab group Houman 🙂
We’re growing! Heading link
June 2024 – The Stabryla Lab welcomed its two first undergraduate students this summer (Steven Frausto and Josh Auld Alvarez). Additionally, two graduate students have been officially recruited to start in the Fall 2024 semester.
PI Stabryla goes to EDAR7 Heading link
May 2024 – PI Stabryla presented a poster on her postdoctoral research at the 7th Environmental Dimension of Antibiotic Resistance meeting (EDAR7) in Montreal, Quebec, Canada! This work was done in collaboration with PI Keenum (Michigan Technological University) and Nadratun Chowdhury (EPA) and focused on evolution of antibiotic resistance in the human gut microbiome, titled “Assessing the Reproducibility of Whole-Microbial Community Evolution of AMR: Unraveling the Contributions of Vertical and Horizontal Gene Transfer”. She also participated in a public outreach activity called the EDAR7 Human Library – a library of scientists serving as “books” that members of the public could reserve for 15-minute one-on-one conversations around the threat of antimicrobial resistance. The link to the conference program can be found here.
PI Stabryla gives talk at Northwestern University Heading link
February 2024 – PI Stabryla was invited to give a talk as part of the Environmental Engineering Sciences spring seminar series hosted by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University. Thank you to NU for the invitation! The advertisement for the talk is linked here and the title of her talk was “Leveraging Nanomaterial Design and Microbial Evolution for Next-Generation Solutions to the Antimicrobial Resistance Crisis”.
The Stabryla Lab is under construction Heading link
Jan 2024 – The Stabryla Lab located in 1100 SEL is now under construction.