October 2022

We are excited to announce that CUNY ASRC researchers have received over $100 million in external support since our doors were opened in fall 2014! This is a significant milestone as these funds underwrite the important scientific research and outreach efforts that our relatively small, but highly dedicated community of researchers engages in. We’re grateful that federal, local, and private funders have realized the importance and potential of our work.

We are proud to announce the 2022-2023 awardees for the CUNY ASRC SEED Grant Program, a program that provides funding to CUNY researchers pursuing interdisciplinary STEM projects that strive to inform and potentially lead to improved human, societal, and environmental well-being in the years to come.

The newly launched Student Experience in Ecological Research (StEER) fellowship aims to help CUNY students who are tight on time pursue ecological field research. Created by Professor Andrew Reinmann, CUNY ASRC Environmental Sciences Initiative, in May 2021, the program will annually select three to four students to work at New Hampshire’s Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest on a year-long project that is tailored to their schedules.

Thanks to a new $3 million National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Training grant, faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center and the ASRC Nanoscience Initiative have launched Nanoscience Connected to Life, a new program to train diverse Ph.D. students for careers that integrate aspects of life sciences with nanoscience. Using  breakthroughs in computing, engineering, molecular biology, biochemistry, and complexity science as a starting point, students in the program will explore new ways to mimic and adapt nature to create nanoscale materials and devices that bring powerful, sustainable solutions to health care, renewable energy, and space exploration.

Professor Kevin Gardner, founding director of the CUNY ASRC Structural Biology Initiative, was recently named recipient of Biophysical Society’s 2023 Award for the Biophysics of Health and Disease. Biophysical Society, an international scientific society, and the largest professional biophysics society, recognized Gardner for his work leading to the development of a novel cancer therapy drug called belzutifan. He was also selected to serve on the New York City Mayor’s Life Science Advisory Council, which will help guide the city’s growth in the life sciences industry.

Please join us in welcoming Professor Qiushi Guo to the CUNY ASRC Photonics Initiative. Professor Guo received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Yale University and was named the 2021 Henry Prentiss Becton Graduate Prize awardee for his exceptional research achievements at the university. Through his research, Professor Guo aims to overcome grand challenges of modern photonics to enhance or create technologies that revolutionize fields like biomedical imaging and sensing, quantum and classical optical computing, and remote sensing. “The CUNY ASRC has the state-of-the-art nanofabrication and measurement facilities that are crucial for my research,” says Guo. “It is extremely exciting for me to be a part of this community and contribute to its extraordinary impact.”

Each brain has an army of primary immune cells called Microglia. While these cells usually participate in normal brain processes and protect our brain from injuries and infections, they can become dysfunctional as we age and trigger dementia-causing diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Genetics plays a role in the risk for these diseases, but studies show that non-genetic factors, such as habits and experiences, also have an influence. CUNY ASRC Neuroscience Initiative Professor Pinar Ayata recently received an award that is helping her explore those external factors. With funding from the CUNY Junior Faculty Research Award in Science and Engineering (JFRASE), she and her team are working to discover how non-genetic factors make the brain’s immune cells dysfunctional. Their findings could have a long-lasting impact on public health policies and lead to the development of therapeutics against dementia.

Professor Ayata, who also received a 2022 Alzheimer’s Association Research Grant (AARG), joins a select group of 26 CUNY faculty who have won the JFRASE program award since 2012. The program aims to cultivate excellence and ensure the promise of research-intensive, early-career science and engineering faculty at CUNY. It funds research projects for tenure-track junior faculty at CUNY who display the potential to make a significant contribution to the university, society, and their academic field.

Congratulations to Christopher Ryan and Yeojin Jung for being named the first Dr. Joan Eliasoph Fellows for Early Career STEM Researchers! The fellowship, whose namesake paved a distinguished radiology career over eight decades, will support early-stage research in basic science at the CUNY ASRC. The fellowship will be awarded annually to two early career scientists in the process of building their technical and professional skills as CUNY doctoral students.

This month, we welcomed six new GC CUNY Science Communications Fellows: Sonia Grout de Beaufort, Georgia Efegenia, Daniel Okpattah, Rebecca Rand, Mark Popinchalk, and Saugat Bolakhe. The fellowship, recently revamped to include CUNY STEM and journalism graduate students, will provide each fellow with hands-on training in science communication content like science writing and public engagement. We can’t wait to see the ways that they will weave science and communications together. Get to know the 2022 cohort — who hail from the United States, Ghana, and Nepal — and keep an eye out for their project in coming months.

The Live Imaging and Bioenergetics Facility at the CUNY ASRC supports an array of applications, including in vivo imaging of live animals, time-lapse live cell imaging with high resolution optical sectioning, deep imaging of fixed CLARITY tissues, calcium imaging, photo switching and photo uncaging, Fluorescence Recovery After Photobleaching (FRAP), Förster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET), laser ablation, and measuring mitochondrial respiration and glycolysis in live cells in real time. The facility also provides advanced imaging analysis software Imaris for data processing. Visit the facility webpage for a full list of available instrumentation.