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In 2016, Nikhil Nair received a National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award. The award recognized his work on engineering naturally-occurring, safe, gut bacteria to treat inborn errors of metabolism (IEMs), a relatively poorly-studied family of debilitating genetic disorders that affect patients from birth.

Although each of the 500 or so IEMs are individually considered “orphan diseases”—conditions that affect fewer than 200,000 people nationwide—as a group they affect almost 1 in 1,500 newborns. Because of the rarity of individual IEMs, few researchers explore possible treatments. Currently, the sole treatment option for many patients with IEMs is to eat a severely restricted diet, and even then, doing so is usually not sufficient to avoid all developmental issues.

DEPARTMENT OF CHEMICAL + BIOLOGICAL ENGINEERING

The bacteria have the ability to stimulate the expulsion of toxins, halting their build-up and allowing patients to eat normally.

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Engineering gut bacteria treats inborn errors of metabolism.

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“There are many rare diseases that don’t really have any treatment options and don’t attract the interest of researchers. But the people suffering from those diseases are just as deserving of our attention,” says Assistant Professor Nikhil Nair.

Photo: Alonso NicholsIN THIS ISSUE

From the Chair

Research Highlights

Off Campus

Faculty Highlights

Graduates

Alumni News

In Memoriam

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Engineering Complex (SEC), a brand-new, state-of-the-art laboratory building scheduled for completion this spring. Please stay tuned for additional news on the SEC.

This newsletter highlights prestigious peer recognitions of scholarly achievements, groundbreaking research conducted by faculty and students, and internal and external awards that recognize and support the department’s activities in research, teaching, and service. I am delighted to share the news that Assistant Professor Nikhil Nair has received the prestigious NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, one of the highest honors for early-career investigators. Congratulations, Nik!

I am also pleased to tell you that the department’s productivity continues to rise. Over this past year, faculty members have secured new grants and contracts totaling more than $3 million, obtaining funding from various federal and non-federal sources—the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Defense, Biogen, Merck, and Pfizer, to name a few. Faculty and students also continue to publish their research results in high-impact journals and give invited and keynote lectures across the country and the world.

On a somber note, I am saddened to share with you the passing of Research Professor Howard Saltsburg, who retired from active service to the department in 2014. We will miss Professor Saltsburg dearly.

Thanks to the efforts of talented and dedicated faculty members, students, and staff, as well as generous support from our alumni and friends, the department continues to thrive as a vibrant community of learning and scholarship.

With warm regards,

Kyongbum Lee Professor and Chair

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I hope that this letter finds you well. I am very pleased to tell you that it has been another highly successful year for the department. We have graduated a stellar class of students, welcomed new faces, and celebrated the many wonderful accomplishments of our students, faculty, and staff.

Earlier last year, Dr. Prashant Deshlahra joined the department as an assistant professor. His research combines theory and experiments to study heterogeneous catalysis and its applications to problems relevant to clean energy and sustainability. I am delighted to have Professor Deshlahra become a member of our faculty, and I invite you to learn more about him by reading this newsletter and his faculty homepage on our departmental website.

The arrival of Assistant Professor Deshlahra as well as Assistant Professor James Van Deventer in the fall of 2015 led to the construction of two new laboratories at the Science and Technology Center, adding to the departmental research portfolio an array of capabilities for materials characterization and biomolecular engineering. This coming summer, the department will further increase its laboratory facilities through spaces that will become available in the Science and

Notables...Professor Maria Flytzani-Stephanopoulous received the Carol Tyler Award from the International Precious Metals Institute (IPMI), in recognition of her contributions to precious metals research. She was also named an honorary professor at the prestigious Tianjin University in China.

Professor Kyongbum Lee received an NSF grant to fund Tufts’ interdisciplinary Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program, which will teach data science approaches to analyzing and designing complex biological systems.

Professor Christos Georgakis has been selected as this year’s recipient of the Tufts Distinguished Scholar Award by the AS&E Faculty Research Awards Committee.

The Tufts Synthetic Biology iGEM team was granted $10,000 from TII in 2015 to pursue independent research under Assistant Professor Nikhil Nair’s guidance. They won a bronze medal at the iGEM Jamboree in fall 2015.

Doctoral candidate Jessica Stieglitz and alumnus Brian Rohr, E13, received the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship award.

Andrade Hendricks, E17, was an inaugural recipient of funding from the Bruce-Griffey Leadership and Diversity Internship Fund, which supports current Tufts students who are leaders on campus and have demonstrated a commitment to public service. With the funding, Hendricks completed an internship at New England Biolabs.

Ph.D. candidate Jilei Liu received a student travel award from the Catalysis and Reaction Engineering Division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) to present his work at the 2016 AIChE annual meeting in San Francisco.

FROM THE CHAIR

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Nair and members of his synthetic biology laboratory are modifying lactobacillus bacteria that could produce enzymes that intercept and detoxify amino acids before they can be improperly metabolized to harm patients with IEMs. The lactobacilli Nair is using are sold over-the-counter as probiotics and appear naturally in breast milk, so they can be administered as drops or stirred into food ingested by patients as young as newborns.

When populated to a healthy density in a patient’s intestines, these bacteria have the ability to stimulate the expulsion of toxins, halting their buildup and allowing patients to eat normally rather than relying on a synthetic diet of mixed

amino acids. Nair has also proposed self-regulating control mechanisms to allow the bacteria to manage their own population within the intestines. If there are too many or too few, the patient can eat an ingestible chemical signal that would instruct the bacteria to die off or to multiply.

“Nik’s work is another example of the great research being done in engineering for human health,” said the School of Engineering’s Dean Jianmin Qu. “His unique approach to the study of infant diseases through the modification of gut microbes could have wide-reaching impact on the treatment of metabolic diseases as a whole.”n

Engineering Gut Bacteria Continued from page 1

Inflammatory State in Differentiated AdipocytesA growing body of evidence links endocrine-disrupting chemicals with obesity-related metabolic diseases. Little is known, though, about the chemicals’ effects on adult adipose tissue.

Recent Ph.D. recipient Sara Manteiga and Professor and Chair Kyongbum Lee demonstrated that mono-ethylhexyl phthalate (MEHP) can induce a pro-inflammatory state in differentiated adipocytes. In a study published in Environmental Health Perspectives, Manteiga and Lee reported finding that repeated exposure to MEHP caused changes in metabolite and enzyme levels. In addition, the chemical exposure increased the expression of inflammatory cytokines, including chemotactic factors.

Read more at:  ehp.niehs.nih.gov/ehp464/

Manteiga, S. and K. Lee. “Monoethylhexyl Phthalate Elicits an Inflammatory Response in Adipocytes Characterized by Alterations in Lipid and Cytokine Pathways.” Environ. Health Perspect. 6, 25263, doi: 10.1289/ EHP464 (2016). n

Zwitterion-Containing Ionogel ElectrolytesA team of researchers from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering recently published a study of ionic liquids, which are molten salts at or near room temperature.

The paper, published in Chemistry of Materials, described the first use of zwitterionic copolymer-supported ionic liquid gel electrolytes.

The researchers—including graduate researcher Fatin Lind, undergraduate Luis Rebollar, Ph.D. candidate Prity Bengani-Lutz, Assistant Professor Ayse Asatekin, and Associate Professor Matthew Panzer—found that these nonvolatile, nonflammable gel electrolytes exhibited tunable elastic moduli while still maintaining a high room temperature ionic conductivity. They could be used, in the future, in safer electrochemical energy storage devices, including supercapacitors and batteries.

Read more at: pubs.acs.org/doi/bs/10.1021/acs.chemmater.6b04456

Lind, F., et al. “Zwitterion-Containing Ionogel Electrolytes.” Chem. Mater. 28, 8480-8483, doi: 10.1021/acs.chemmater.6b04456 (2016). n

In 2016, Professor Maria Flytzani-Stephanopoulos delivered the keynote address at the

International Congress on Catalysis, and was a plenary lecturer at both the Single Atom Catalysis Symposium and the International Conference on Environmental Catalysis. She was also the Distinguished Lecturer at the Rutgers University Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering in April 2017.

Professor and Chair Kyongbum Lee delivered several seminars in 2016 and 2017, speaking to the

Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Rochester, at the Center for Translational Environmental Health Research at Texas A&M Health Science Center, and at the Colorado School of Mines. In March 2017, he delivered a talk to the Department of Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University.

Associate Professor Matthew Panzer delivered seminars at the University of Edinburgh and

Princeton University in 2016, and at City College of New York in March 2017.

Schematic illustration of the two types of cross-links (x-links) present in zwitterion-containing ionogels, as well as an attractive interaction (ion-dipole) between an ionic liquid ion and ZI functional group.

OFF CAMPUSRESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS

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Ayse Asatekin Assistant ProfessorIn September 2016, Assistant Professor Ayse Asatekin was named the John A. and Dorothy M. Adams Faculty Development Professor, in recognition of her outstanding research program and potential. Asatekin received her Ph.D. in chemical engineering with a concentration in polymer science and technology in 2009 from MIT, where she was awarded the Materials Research Society’s Graduate Student Gold Award. She is also the co-founder and scientific advisor of Clean Membranes, Inc., a start-up company that will commercialize her polyacrylonitrile-based membrane technology that she began developing during her doctoral research.

Astekin directs the Smart Polymers, Membranes, and Separations Laboratory, which aims to develop the next generation of membranes to generate clean, safe water more efficiently, and to separate chemicals with lower energy use. In 2016, Asatekin received a five-year $500,000 early career award from

the National Science Foundation (NSF) for her research, which will lead to the development of improved membranes for separations underserved by existing technologies, such as peptide separations and textile wastewater

treatment. More recently, she was elected to the Board of Directors of the North American Membrane Society, and was named the U.S. program co-chair for the ninth annual Sino-U.S. Joint Conference on Chemical Engineering. n

Prashant Deshlahra Assistant Professor Prashant Deshlahra received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 2012, performing his dissertation research with Professors Eduardo Wolf and William Schneider on spectroscopic and computational probes of electric fields near catalyst-support interfaces.

His postdoctoral research with Professor Enrique Iglesia at UC Berkeley was focused on mechanisms of dehydration and oxidative dehydrogenation reactions of alcohols on polyoxometalate catalysts. Deshlahra’s research group at Tufts University seeks to develop better understanding of heterogeneous catalysis and its applications to problems relevant to energy and the environment.

James Van DeventerAssistant Professor James Van Deventer joined Tufts ChBE from postdoctoral training in the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. His work there included engineering antibodies capable of targeting cancer-associated fibroblasts and enhancing yeast display with noncanonical amino acids.

He received his B.S. in chemical engineering from Stanford University, and completed M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at the California Institute of Technology. Van Deventer is currently interested in using biomolecular engineering, synthetic biology, and chemical biology to establish new strategies for treating cancer and other complex diseases.

FACULTY HIGHLIGHTS

NEW FACES

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CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR GRADUATES

Doctoral RecipientsYongjia Fan (February 2016) Thesis: Scalable Xeno-Free Expansion of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells in Stirred- Suspension Vessels and Their Differentiation into Pancreatic Progenitor Cells Advisor: Manolis Tzanakakis

Sukwon Jung (August 2015) Thesis: Integrated Fabrication-Conjugation Approaches for Biomolecular Assembly and Protein Sensing with Biopolymeric–Synthetic Hydrogel Microparticle Platforms and Bioorthogonal Reactions Advisor: Hyunmin Yi

Adrian Li (February 2016) Thesis: Silk-Based Stabilization of Biospecimens Advisor: David Kaplan

Chongyang Wang (May 2016) Thesis: Catalytic Conversion of Short-Chain Alcohols on Atomically Dispersed Au and Pd Supported on Nanoscale Metal Oxides Advisor: Maria Flytzani-Stephanopoulos

Ming Yang (August 2015) Thesis: Atomically Dispersed Gold and Platinum Species on Various Oxide Supports for Catalytic Low-Temperature Hydrogen Generation Advisor: Maria Flytzani-Stephanopoulos

Changqiong Zhu (February 2016) Thesis: Copper Oxide Thin Films through Solution Based Methods for Electrical Energy Conversion and Storage Advisor: Matthew Panzer

Congratulations to our newest alumni! The Class of 2016 was honored during commencement weekend with a brunch hosted by the department to recognize students’ hard work during the past four years. During the festivities, students showed their families around SciTech and introduced them to members of the faculty. Three students graduated with summa cum laude honors: Jacob Gerace, Yangming Kou, and Tyler Lueck. Two students successfully pursued and defended a senior honors thesis: Yangming Kou and Jesse Starger.

Bachelor of Science RecipientsMarilyn Allen

Jacob Berliner

Shivani Bigler

Michael Charewycz

Elisha Converse

Lily Corcoran

Yikai Ding

Tingyi Dong

Shira Faigel

Wilson French

Sika Gadzanku

Jacob Gerace

Lani Godenzi

Rachael Grudt

Sara Hogan

Lindsey Jacobs

Do Kim

Yangming Kou

Hirosei Kuruma

Rebecca Lawlor

Tyler Lueck

Ryan Messinger

Margaret Nederpelt

Michelle Ng

Alexandria Northrup

Megan Rabideau

Benjamin Randall

Conner Russell

Mitchell Saeger

Abigail Sah

Christopher Shinopoulos

Jesse Starger

Patrick Sudol

Kaelyn Vik

Yi-Shuan Wang

Departmental Award Winners Marilyn Allen, E16 Frederick Melvin Ellis Prize

Rachael Grudt, E16 Audrey Butvay Gruss Science Award

Chris Keyes, E18 Karno Dean’s Award for Academic Excellence and Leadership

Yangming (Tim) Kou, E16 Class of 1898 Prize

Yangming (Tim) Kou and Tyler Lueck, E16 Departmental Award for Outstanding CHBE Student

Master of Science RecipientMitchell Saeger (May 2016) Thesis: Effect of Carbodiimide Functionalization Chemistry on Alginate Structure and Hydrogel Properties Advisors: Ayse Asatekin and Darryl Williams

M.S. Bioengineering: Cell and Bioprocess TrackQiannan Ma (May 2016) Thesis: Engineering Oral Formulation of Adenosin and Parabacteroides distansonis for Suppressing Colorectal Cancer Advisor: Qiaobing Xu

Yi Tang (May 2016) Thesis: Examination of Tunable Structures of Biopolymeric-Synthetic Hybrid Hydrogel Microspheres Composed of Chitosan and Poly(ethylene glycol) Advisor: Hyunmin Yi

Master of Engineering RecipientZhenjia Wang (May 2016)

M.E. Bioengineering: Cell and Bioprocess TrackLaura Dinn (May 2016)

Joseph Lattari (August 2015)

Justin Lee (May 2016)

Sean Marnane (May 2016)

Brian Pink (August 2015)

Lawrence Weiner (May 2016)

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Marilyn Allen, E16, was accepted into the chemical and biological engineering Ph.D. program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and was awarded a fellowship for her first year.

Matt Boucher, who studied in the Nano Catalysis and Energy Laboratory at Tufts and completed his Ph.D. in 2013, recently took a position as a principal scientist/engineer at Physical Sciences, Inc.

Maria Choi, EG15, joined Biogen as an associate engineer.

Jacob Gerace, E16, is pursuing a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Notre Dame.

Bassel Ghaddar, EG15, was admitted to the M.D./Ph.D. program at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Princeton University.

Sara Manteiga, who completed her Ph.D. in 2016, joined Vertex as a scientist.

Scott McArthur, E12, joined MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations program, working on his M.S. in mechanical engineering and his M.B.A. at the Sloan School of Management.

Abigail Sah, E16, joined the energy science, technology, and policy master’s program in the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

Gautham Sridharan, EG13, was hired at Alnylam as a scientist.

Ioannis Valsamakis, who completed his Ph.D. at Tufts in 2012 and pursued his postdoctoral research in the Tufts Nano Catalysis and Energy Laboratory, recently joined Entegris Corporation as a senior R&D scientist. n

Stabilizing Blood Samples

ALUMNI UPDATES/NEWS

Adrian Li, who completed his Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 2016 and is now a senior engineer at Vaxess Technologies, was part of a Tufts team that studied the use of air-dried silk protein to stabilize blood samples without refrigeration. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the technology could improve

clinical care and research for underserved groups. This research was Tufts University’s entrant in the 2017 STAT Madness research competition, where it competed against innovations from universities like Ohio State and Yale.

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IN MEMORIAM

Research Professor Howard Saltsburg passed away on February 11, 2016. He was a long-time member of the department, working as a research professor from 1998 to 2015, and he served as acting chair from 2001–2002.

Professor Saltsburg received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Boston University in 1955. After working as a scientist in both private industry and national laboratories, he was a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Rochester for more than 20 years.

While at Tufts, Professor Saltsburg worked with Professor Maria Flytzani-Stephanopoulos in a collaboration that resulted in several seminal publications that have been cited more than 2,500 times to date. Working closely with Professor Stephanopoulos, Professor Saltsburg helped advise more than 10 doctoral students during his time at Tufts. Reflecting on his distinguished career as a scientist, we fondly remember him as a teacher, researcher, and mentor to students and faculty.

If you wish to leave a remembrance of Professor Saltsburg, please send an email to chbe@tufts.edu and we will forward the collected responses to his family. n

Remembering Howard Saltsburg, Research Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering

Reflecting on his distinguished career as a scientist, we fondly remember Professor Saltsburg as a teacher, researcher, and mentor to students and faculty.

In 2016, Chemical and Biological Engineering majors Grace Aro and Luis Rebollar each received Summer Scholars funding to carry out an independent research project. For her project, Aro created and studied zwitterionic membranes in Assistant Professor Ayse Asatekin’s lab. To learn more about the project, visit: go.tufts.edu/aro

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