Stories

We’ve had a fun year in the Fuller lab! I was on sabbatical from January-September, 2016, and I enjoyed the extra time to get back into the lab more. I also spent some time during the sabbatical attending lab meetings and doing a few new experiments at UCSF; it was great to be immersed in such an active lab there. In other great news for the lab, I received a new grant from the National Science Foundation to support our research for another three years. Our peptoids have been hard at work too—the Stokes lab here at SCU recently published a paper in in Langmuir describing interactions of peptoids made in my laboratory with silica.

The lab continues to attract a lot of excellent and enthusiastic students. They have been hard at work on a few different projects to synthesize, purify, and study new peptidomimetics. We started a few new projects over the summer, including applications of our molecules to bind to small organic molecules, to metals, and to DNA. I’m also working hard now to get some of our latest results into the research literature. I’m looking forward to finding some new students to join the lab this spring to carry on the work of our four seniors—they will leave big shoes to fill!

To highlight some of our student achievements and contributions, last spring was marked by two student awards to support the work of these individuals in the lab over the summer: Daniel Tiano (’17) won the ALZA Science Scholar Award, and Caroline Bosmajian (’17) won the Rich Bastiani award. Kristiana Tenorio (’17) also joined the lab and continued to work over the summer alongside Daniel, Caroline, Jack Huber (’17), and Aanchal Mohan (’16).  All of these students presented their work at a departmental  poster  session on campus in August.  

In June, we celebrated the graduation and achievements of our seniors, Kyra McComas, Aanchal Mohan, and Vikrum Jain. Kyra is currently in medical school at the University of Utah. Vikrum and Aanchal are in the midst of applying to medical and dental school programs, respectively. This fall, we welcomed Janelle Tobias (’18) to the lab, and Aanchal has been promoted to Research Assistant in the lab. This motivated team will certainly move our science forward in the coming year!

 Fuller and student Daniel Tiano travel to Cuba

Amelia Fuller and student Daniel Tiano ('17) recently attended the Ernest Eliel Workshop—U.S. andCuba Collaboration in Chemistry Education & Neglected Disease Drug Discovery took place at the University of Havana, Cuba, on October 17–21. The workshop was co-sponsored by the American Chemical Society and the Cuban Society for Chemistry and aimed to foster new scientific and cultural collaborations among U.S. and Cuban scientists by building on the Distributed Drug Discovery program implemented at SCU and other universities internationally that links science education to neglected disease drug discovery. Along with other faculty and undergraduate students from two other U.S. universities, Prof. Fuller and Daniel Tiano gave lectures, led hands-on laboratory experiments, and engaged in collaborative research discussions.

Editor’s note:  Amelia Fuller received a $300,000 award from NSF.  These funds will support her project "RUI: Synthesis, Structural and Functional Studies of Bioinspired Macrocyclic Oligoamides".