We’re thrilled to announce that Sam’s proposal has been awarded the prestigious DARPA Young Faculty Award! This recognition is given to only a few (~20) young professors across the USA annually. It is also the first time we’ve received such a grant at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering.
This award will allow Sam’s team to develop cutting-edge microfluidic environments (chip networks) to study how mixed microbial populations behave over time, especially under stress like antibiotics or nutrient depletion. They aim to understand how the physical environment impacts these communities, even when their genetic and ecological properties remain unchanged. This could pave the way for creating synthetic microbial communities that produce complex compounds, like therapeutic molecules.
The Oliveira lab will use advanced tools like microfluidics, time-lapse microscopy, and AI to analyze how these microbes grow and change in real time. By gathering large amounts of data on cell behavior and fluid dynamics, they hope to create models that predict how these synthetic communities will function in controlled environments.
The project will deliver a library of dynamic microenvironments, a rich database of long-term microscopy data, and a new co-design theory that could speed up the development of synthetic microbial communities by 40%. It will also develop a CAD tool to help design these communities based on specific functions and microfluidic setups.
This award is a tremendous honor and milestone for Sam and JSNN, marking an exciting, fruitful new chapter in our research!
Check our research Menu and major sponsors and collaborators on our website at https://www.oliveiralab.me/research
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