Simona Patange, a biophysics doctoral degree candidate and member of the NCI-UMD Partnership program, will be the graduate student speaker for the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences’ May Commencement Celebration. Patange’s advisors were Michelle Girvan (IPST/Physics/Biophysics), Daniel Larson and David Levens from the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) National Cancer Institute (NCI).




Milos Nikolic, UMD biophysics Ph.D. student and NCI-UMD Partnership student, and Giuliano Scarcelli, assistant professor in UMD's Fischell Department of Bioengineering, co-authored a paper with colleagues that was published on April 3, 2020, in the journal Small.

Mary Pitman, UMD-NCI program student, is an inaugural co-recipient of the NIH Center for Cancer Research (CCR), National Cancer Institute (NCI), Outstanding Ph.D. Student Award. The Center established the award in recognition of their contribution as a group, and to highlight some of the best Ph.D. work in the CCR laboratories. Over 100 students across clinical and basic science labs–including UMD, JHU and Oxford–were considered.

Mary Pitman, a Ph.D. student in chemistry and member of the NCI-UMD Partnership program, published a first-author paper "Minimal Cylinder Analysis Reveals the Mechanical Properties of Oncogenic Nucleosomes" with co-authors Yamini Dalal (NIH/NCI) and Garegin Papoian (Chemistry and Biochemistry/IPST). The paper was published online February 11, 2020, in Biophysical Journal. 

Tsung-Jen Liao, biochemistry Ph.D. student and NCI-UMD Partnership student, published a first-author paper titled "High-Affinity Interactions of the nSH3/cSH3 Domains of Grb2 with the C-Terminal Proline-Rich Domain of SOS1" in the Journal of the American Chemical Society on January 23, 2020. Paper co-authors included NIH's Ruth Nussinov and UMD Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry David Fushman. 

We are pleased to announce the launch of the NCI-UMD Partnership for Integrative Cancer Research 2020 seed awards competition. NCI Investigators and UMD Faculty are invited to submit collaborative projects for graduate student support in the areas of integrative cancer research and bioengineering.

Barry Liang, a bioengineering Ph.D. student in the NCI-UMD Partnership program, co-authored an article with advisor Huang‐Chiao Huang of the Fischell Department of Engineering at UMD and colleagues titled "Harnessing the Potential Synergistic Interplay Between Photosensitizer Dark Toxicity and Chemotherapy." The paper was published in the journal Photochemistry and Photobiology on December 19, 2019. In the paper, the researchers investigated the interplay between photodynamic therapies without light activation and photochemotherapies in two glioblastoma lines.

The Institute for Physical Science and Technology will host The Integrative Cancer Research Minisymposium on November 15, 2019. The minisymposium will highlight results from current collaborations and talks from NIH researchers. Researchers from other NIH institutes are welcome to participate and collaborate with our UMD colleagues. During the break, there will be ample time to discuss possible joint research projects.

Mary Pitman, a Ph.D. student in chemistry and member of the NCI-UMD Partnership program, co-authored a paper "Intrinsic elasticity of nucleosomes is encoded by histone variants and calibrated by their binding partners" with co-authors Yamini Dalal (NIH/NCI) and Garegin Papoian (Chemistry and Biochemistry/IPST). The paper was published online November 11, 2019, in PNAS. 

NCI-UMD Partnership Co-director and Fischell Department of Bioengineering (BIOE) assistant professor and alumna Kimberly Stroka (Ph.D. ’11) was named a 2019 Young Innovator by Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering, a journal of the Biomedical Engineering Society. Stroka was recognized for her efforts to shed new light on the factors that lead breast tumors to metastasize to the brain.