Research Supported with Summer Awards
Photo of students that received MII Summer Undergraduate Research Awards.
This summer, the Macromolecules Innovation Institute (MII) awarded 20 undergraduate students $5,000 each to support their research in polymer science and engineering. This award recognizes the contributions of these students towards advancing molecular science.
Awardees will present their research to students, faculty, and industry representatives at the MII Technical Conference and Review and the Virginia Tech Summer Research Conference.
Awards are funding the following research:
| Student Awardee | Macromolecular Research Area |
| Amitoj Arora | Biodegradable polymers (Sadeghi Group) |
| Gavin Bates | Biopolymer aerogels (Duraj-Thatte Group) |
| Connor Blankenship | Polyolefin blends (Coote Group) |
| Kyle Bluhm | Organism movement on polymer fibers (Nain Group) |
| Keelin Craige | Alginate nanocomposite aerogels (Martin Group) |
| Grace Genelin | UHMW polylipoates (Worch Group) |
| Christian Harris | Sensors for collagen (Behkam Group) |
| Jacey Hendrix | Functionalized natural rubber (Liu Group) |
| Jana Kandagiri | Polymeric chelators (Schulz Group) |
| Alexa Kundrat | Sulfonated PEEK (Moore Group) |
| Jacob Liu | Protein hydrogels (Duraj-Thatte Group) |
| Preston Messino | Light-switchable polymers (Cheng Group) |
| Alexander Milliken | PET/CNT aerogels (Moore Group) |
| Madison Patton | Biomass extraction of REEs (Schulz Group) |
| Laura Prince | Enzyme inspired water oxidation with MOFs (Morris Group) |
| Renee Silarszka | Selective laser sintering of dynamic polymers (Sarmah Group) |
| Sanghun Son | Polymer composites for cunductive interconnects (Bartlett Group) |
| Jonathan Spear | Thermoset polymerization (Sarmah Group) |
| Zoey Walker | Lignin thermosets (Frazier Group) |
| Alex Ward | Kinetics of ROMP (Matson Group) |