Principal Investigator Heading link
Lisa Stabryla
Assistant Professor of Environmental Engineering
Training
Postdoctoral Fellow, National Research Council (NRC)-National Institute of Standards and Technology (2021-2023)
Ph.D. Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Pittsburgh (2021)
M.S. Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Pittsburgh (2017)
B.S. Engineering Science, University of Pittsburgh (2015)
Email: stabryla@uic.edu
Links: Google Scholar, Research Gate, LinkedIn, Twitter, CME Department webpage
Lisa Stabryla is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Materials, and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), having just started in this new role in January 2024. Her research informs the sustainable design of next-generation, nano-enabled antimicrobial materials, and more generally, advances the application potential of engineered nanomaterials and other emerging materials and technologies proposed for use in areas at the nexus of the environment and public health. She is an expert in nanoparticle synthesis and characterization and has extensive experience evaluating their antimicrobial efficacy and establishing relationships between physicochemical nanoparticle properties and their underlying mechanisms of antimicrobial activity. She has experience working with pure cultures and complex microbial systems, and using both traditional, culture-based microbiological methods as well as advanced molecular characterization techniques. Her research also includes understanding the role of microbial evolution in the development of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and how we can harness microbial evolution and fitness as strategies for novel antimicrobial design and improving measurement capabilities for rapid AMR detection, identification and quantification in the clinic and environment. Her work has been published in Nature Nanotechnology, ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, and Environmental Science: Nano. Prior to joining UIC, she was a National Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) where she used next-generation sequencing technologies and culture-based approaches to explore development of novel, physiologically-based, rapid detection methods for drug-resistant pathogens and assisted in developing plasmid DNA-based AMR standards for wastewater surveillance. There, she also engaged with stakeholders from industry, federal, state, local, national labs, and other government agencies through multiple consortia and working groups to discuss standards related to AMR and wastewater monitoring as well as microbiome multi-omics measurements. She obtained her Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh in 2021, where her work was funded by a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship.
PhD Students Heading link
Houman Niknam
Materials Engineering, University of Illinois-Chicago
Email: hnikn@uic.edu
Houman comes to UIC with a Master’s degree in Material Science and Engineering from Kashan University, Kashan, Iran. His expertise and interests are in the field of nanomaterials, nanomedicines, catalysts, and energy storage. Furthermore, he is passionate about working on new ideas and learning new skills to combine them with his prior knowledge. Prior to coming to UIC and joining the Stabryla Lab, Houman worked as a metallurgy engineer in Kian Sanaat Foolad Parsian Company for two years and was the operator of the Materials Science Laboratory at the University of Kashan, working with equipment such as FESEM and XRD.
Undergraduate Students Heading link
Steven Frausto
Environmental Engineering major, University of Illinois-Chicago
Email: sfrau3@uic.edu
Short Bio: ((coming soon))
Undergraduate Students Heading link
Josh Auld Alvarez
Integrative Biology major, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign
Email: joshuaa7@illinois.edu
Short Bio: ((coming soon))