BioE PhD students Augusto Tentori and Todd Duncombe, both of Professor Amy Herr’s lab, were selected as NSF EAPSI scholars for Summer 2014, allowing them to do research in Korea and Taiwan, respectively.
The EAPSI award provides U.S. graduate students in science, engineering, and education research experiences in Australia, China, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Singapore or Taiwan; EAPSI awards help students initiate professional relationships and future collaborations with foreign counterparts.
Tentori spent the summer at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea with Professors Jong-man Kim and Justyn Jaworski from the Department of Chemical Engineering. (Jaworski is also a BioE alumnus!)
“The EAPSI program was a great opportunity for me to not only learn about a new research topic, but also to get immersed in a different culture and experience how scienfitic research is done in another country,” said Tentori. “Despite any differences, I learned that scientists and engineers everywhere are largely motivated by the same goals.”
For Augusto’s research, he leveraged his experience with polyacrylamide gel fabrication in Professor Amy Herr’s lab to explore the potential of PDA-embedded gels for sensing mechanical forces exerted by cells during tissue culture and also to detect molecular binding events during electrophoresis.