News

Ford lab graduate student Rhea Braun recently volunteered with Wahoo Wizards and KidVention for STEM outreach with K-4th graders. Rhea hosted a booth about sonfication of data, where students created their own drawings to be sonified by the algorithm used in her research. Students drew everything from basic patterns to cats, very cool!

Congratulations to Ford lab graduate student Xueying Zhao on a succesful defense of her Ph.D. dissertation entitled "Chemotaxis in Microorgnism Transport toward Competing Stimuli". Xueying was helpful to train new Ford lab students, established essential microfluidic techniques to the Ford lab, and she will be missed! Xueying started her new job at Becton Dickinson in San Jose, California. Congratulations Dr. Xueying Zhao!

Congratulations to Ford undergraduate student Derek Wu on winning a 3rd place poster award in the Environmental Science and Engineering group at the 2021 AIChE annual meeting! Derek's poster title was "Application of Machine Learning to Identify Key Parameters in Chemotactic Bacterial Distributions Near Oil Ganglia In Porous Media".

Congratulations to Tracy Kuper on a successful Ph.D. proposal defense! The title of Tracy's proposal was "Multi-scale models to predict and control bacterial biofilm formation". The Ford group celebrated over lunch at Tracy's favorite Thai restaurant.

Congratulations to Sanha Kim for passing his Ph.D. qualifying exam! The title of Sanha's exam was "Modeling Pathogen Growth and Transport in Mucus Porous Media". The Ford group celebrated with apple picking at Carter Mountain!

Ford graduate student Tracy Kuper presented a 30 minute talk at the 2021 AIChE annual meeting in the Topical Conference: Microbes at Biomedical Interfaces, Session: Advances in Antimicrobial and Antifouling Materials. The title of her talk was "Chemorepllent-loaded Polymeric Nanocarriers for Biofilm Inhibition". Congratulations Tracy!

Congratulations to graduate student Beibei Gao on a successful PhD proposal defense! Her proposal is titled "Quantifying the role of chemotaxis in transporting bacteria to an oil-phase contaminant in porous media". The Ford group celebrated over hot pot (prepared by Beibei herself) and board games.

Ford students Beibei Gao and Rhea Braun each gave 15 minute talks at the virtual 2020 American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference. Below are their presentation titles.
Beibei Gao: Chemotactic Bacteria are Retained Near NAPL Ganglia in Saturated Porous Media: Microscopy, Microfluidics and Modeling over Multiple Scales
Rhea Braun: Sonification and Machine Learning Contribute to a Novel Assay of Bacterial Swimming Dynamics

Welcome the new Ford lab member: Sanha Kim! Sanha graduated with a B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Illinois: Urbana-Champaign. He will be working on modelling the expansion of Pseudomonas aeruginosa in cystic fibrotic settings.

Come to read more about Ford group's new project, covered both in university and local news!