U of I News Bureau – Kimberly Sam, who earned a B.S. in molecular and cellular biology from the U of I in May 2017, was one of 14 Illinois students and alumni offered student Fulbright grants to pursue international educational, research, and teaching experiences this coming year. Sam, a member of Beckman’s Bioimaging Science and Technology Group as an undergraduate, was awarded a Fulbright grant to conduct medical research in Ecuador. She received the Erik Haferkamp Memorial Award for Undergraduate Research in 2016 to support research in neuroscience at the Beckman Institute, and she spent two years studying models of traumatic brain injury in neuronal network models while serving as a research assistant for Bioengineering Professor Parijat Sengupta, also a member of the BST Group. Upon completing her Fulbright, Sam plans to attend medical school to pursue an M.D./Ph.D.

The New York Times – Little has been known about visceral fat and brain health in children. For a soon-to-be-published study, researchers from Northeastern University in Boston and at Illinois tracked hundreds of 8- to 10-year-old children in a nine-month after-school exercise program in Urbana. Charles Hillman, now at Northeastern University, conducted the study while at the Beckman Institute.

Nature Materials – In the "News and Views" section of Nature Materials, Joseph Lyding, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and member of Beckman's Nanoelectronics and Nanomaterials Group, discusses work by H-J Gao and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which uses bottom-up patterning to pattern atomically precise metal-semiconductor junctions that could be used in future devices.

Bioengineering at Illinois – Dipanjan Pan, an assistant professor of bioengineering and member of the Bioimaging Science and Technology Group, was elected a 2018 Fellow of the American College of Cardiology for his contributions to translational nanomedicine in cardiovascular science. Working with clinical researchers, Pan has developed several patented classes of targeted theranostic nanotechnologies that are useful for diagnostic imaging and drug delivery in the treatment of artherosclerosis and cancer. In fact, scientists at Washington University have licensed this technology for commercial development.