Stanford University
Showing 11-20 of 20 Results
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Sanzeeda Baig Shuchi
Ph.D. Student in Chemical Engineering, admitted Summer 2021
BioSanzeeda Baig Shuchi envisions a world where energy crisis is a thing of the past. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Chemical Engineering (ChemE) at Stanford University. Her current energy research focuses on improving and understanding lithium battery stability using surface science and interface engineering supervised by Prof. Stacey F. Bent and Prof. Yi Cui. She is a TomKat Center Graduate Fellow for Translational Research and a Link Foundation Energy Fellow. She completed her MS in ChemE from Stanford. She also received the Summer First Fellowship and ChemE departmental fellowship. Before Stanford, she completed her BS in the same field from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), where she graduated with the highest CGPA in the Faculty of Engineering and is a prime minister gold medal candidate. Other than research, she serves as the lab safety officer in Bent group and enjoys performing departmental student mentoring and student representative activities. She has also previously served as a co-organizer of Engineering Students for DEI (ES4DEI) at Stanford and the vice-president of Environment Watch: BUET. Outside the lab, she enjoys houseplants, interior decoration, painting, board games, and exploring local beaches and restaurants.
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Andrew Spakowitz
Senior Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs, Professor of Chemical Engineering, of Materials Science and Engineering and, by courtesy, of Applied Physics
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsTheory and computation of biological processes and complex materials
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James Swartz
James H. Clark Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Chemical Engineering and of Bioengineering
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsProgram Overview
The world we enjoy, including the oxygen we breathe, has been beneficially created by biological systems. Consequently, we believe that innovative biotechnologies can also serve to help correct a natural world that non-natural technologies have pushed out of balance. We must work together to provide a sustainable world system capable of equitably improving the lives of over 10 billion people.
Toward that objective, our program focuses on human health as well as planet health. To address particularly difficult challenges, we seek to synergistically combine: 1) the design and evolution of complex protein-based nanoparticles and enzymatic systems with 2) innovative, uniquely capable cell-free production technologies.
To advance human health we focus on: a) achieving the 120 year-old dream of producing “magic bullets”; smart nanoparticles that deliver therapeutics or genetic therapies only to specific cells in our bodies; b) precisely designing and efficiently producing vaccines that mimic viruses to stimulate safe and protective immune responses; and c) providing a rapid point-of-care liquid biopsy that will count and harvest circulating tumor cells.
To address planet health we are pursuing biotechnologies to: a) inexpensively use atmospheric CO2 to produce commodity biochemicals as the basis for a new carbon negative chemical industry, and b) mitigate the intermittency challenges of photovoltaic and wind produced electricity by producing hydrogen either from biomass sugars or directly from sunlight.
More than 25 years ago, Professor Swartz began his pioneering work to develop cell-free biotechnologies. The new ability to precisely focus biological systems toward efficiently addressing new, “non-natural” objectives has proven tremendously useful as we seek to address the crucial and very difficult challenges listed above. Another critical feature of the program is the courage (or naivete) to approach important objectives that require the development and integration of several necessary-but- not-sufficient technology advances.
