Many thanks to Sebastian for building a towering MMBL double helix sculpture as part of the Minecraft Carnival festivities.

See photo gallery for more pictures of the event.

Thank you to the National Science Foundation! And many congratulations to Susana Beltrán on her NSF GFRP award!

In a multi-component outreach website, Charlotte (Charlie) Andreasen from the Taylor lab introduces her research and takes online visitors on a 360 degree interactive tour of the lab. This project was is part of the LGC STEM Career Explorations and 360° Lab Tours created by the Leonard Gelfand Center for Service Learning and Outreach at CMU.

Charlie was interviewed by Kristin Lavery from the Gelfand Center, and in this video Charlie does an excellent job introducing her research. She also discusses early educators who inspired her to pursue science and engineering as well as lessons learned in undergrad that she wishes she could share with her younger self.

This LGC 360 site also provides interactive self-guided activities for interested middle and high school students to learn about DNA nanotechnology, and they can visit the lab and explore the online through a VR compatible 360 lab tour.

Prof. Taylor was awarded the NSF CAREER award from the CMMI Advanced Manufacturing division for the project "CAREER: Programmable Peptide Nucleic Acid Molecules as Building-blocks for Complex Nanostructures." This grant description is available NSF website: here.

Many thanks to the NSF!

CMU highlighted recent CAREER winners from the College of Engineering in the following article.

Ying and Charlie presented their work at the 9th International Bio-Fluid Mechanics and Vascular Mechano-Biology Symposium in Tucson, AZ.

Congrats on the poster presentation!

Joyce Wang's new podcast Office Hours features informal conversations between faculty who work in very different fields. Supported by the Interdisciplinary Initiative, this work aims help "disrupt silos" while supporting students to pursue interdisciplinary interests. In this first Professor Molly Steenson and Professor Rebecca Taylor discuss design, physical computing, language, creativity and life paths.

Below are links to more information about topics discussed during the podcast episode:

• DNA Nanomachines

• How an 1803 Jacquard Loom Led to Computer Technology

• Manu Prakash and Punch Card Programmable Microfluidics

• Jim McCann and Automatic Machine Knitting of 3D Meshes

• Living at the Micro Scale: The Unexpected Physics of Being Small

Congratulations to graduate students Susana Beltrán and Emma Benjaminson along with our undergraduate all-star team of Annie Chen, Anika Banga, Maya Liu and Rishabh Jain for their recent poster presentations at the Biomedical Engineering Society meeting in Philadelphia!

Sebastian Arias, Balutito Babatunde and Weitao Wang have joined the lab! Welcome and many congratulations.

Tito and Sebastian have both won full GEM fellowships with support from Los Alamos National Labs. Weitao joins us from Notre Dame University, and he has won a Collaborative Student Fellowship from the MechE department!

Prof. Taylor was recently interviewed by Richard Jacobs for the Finding Genius Podcast. To hear about new opportunities for DNA nanotechnology in both manufacturing and nanosensing, please check out the podcast.

Many thanks to Richard and the Finding Genius Podcast team!

• post revised on June 12, 2020 to redirect to the Finding Genius Podcast, the new name for what was previously The Future Tech Podcast

Congratulations to Emma Benjaminson on being awarded an NSF Graduate Fellowship! Emma is studying both the rapid fabrication and control of microscale articulated swimming robots for microsurgery and drug delivery.