Recent News

January 2011- Xiaoyun (Shawn) Yang attended the training on SensiQ SPR sensor at the ICx, in the company, in Oklahoma city, OK.


January 2011: Alice Zitova joined Dr. Simonian’s Group as a Post-doctoral scholar from University College Cork, Ireland. She completed her PhD from Charles University in Prague in 2009.


December 2010: Tony Jefferson Gnanaprakasa defended his Master’s thesis titled Bottom-up surface engineering of DNA macro-assemblies for nanoelectronics and optical biosensors. He is currently pursuing a PhD degree in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Arizona at Tucson.


August 2010: Nitilaksha Hiremath (Nitil) and Jeff Kirsch joined Dr. Simonian’s group. Nitil is a MS student and Jeff is a Undergraduate Research Assistant. Nitil received a BE degree in Textile Technology from Visveswarayya Technological University, India.


June 2010: Tony was sent to the Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety at the University of Guelph, Canada for a collaborative research work on T4 Phage based detection platforms for real-time detection of Escherchia col. in the frame of NATO grant.


May 2010: Dr. Valber Pedrosa successfully finished his post-doctoral position at Auburn University. Dr.Pedrosa has accepted an offer from Instituto de Biociências, Departamento de Química e Bioquímica, UNESP, Botucatu, SP (Brazil) as an Assistant Professor.


January 2010: Xiaoyun (Shawn) Yang joined Dr.Simonian’s group as PhD candidate.


December 2009: Dr. Ramanathan successfully defended her Ph.D on Development of Functional Material Scaffolds for Sensing Applications. Dr. Ramanathan completed her MS at Auburn University and continued as a PhD candidate under Dr. Simonian. Dr. Ramanathan accepted an offer as Post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pittsburgh.


August 2009: Rigved Epur defended his Master’s degree on Electrochemical sensors for the detection of tricresyl phosphate and determination of acid content in engine oils and is currently pursuing a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh.


May 2009: Markhabat Kairova successfully completed her research in the detection of Potato Virus and using antibodies for the detection of bacterial pathogens and returned back to Kazakhstan to pursue her research career.


March 2009: Dr. Paliwal successfully defended her PhD on Development of enzyme-based biosensors for the detection of organophosphate neurotoxins. Dr. Paliwal has accepted offer from Sanofi-Aventis as a Post-doctoral fellow.


July 2008: Our publication in Nano Letters received wide attention and has been recognized by many science websites and news feeds [Nanotech-now], [ScienceDaily], [Physorg], [ACS WebPress], [Nanowerk] and many others...


July 2008: Sheetal Paliwal successfully completed her PhD dissertation. Congratulations and we wish her our very best in her future endeavors.


June 25th 2008: Shankar Balasubramanian successfully completed his PhD dissertation. Congratulations and we wish him our very best in his future endeavors.


June 2008: Congratulations to Shankar Balasubramanian on his postdoctoral appointment with Dr. Joseph Wang. He will be joining Joe Wang at University of California at San Diego.

June 2008: We welcome our new graduate student, Saroja Mantha to join our group. She completed her Masters in Chemical Engineering in India.

 

May 18 - 22, 2008: We are flying to Phoenix to present our new and exciting results at 213th Electrochemical Society meeting

 

April 18th 2008: We are excited about our new publication Strong Antimicrobial Coatings: Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Armored with Biopolymers in Nano Letters. This is the direct result of a strong collaborative effort combining our experience in biomaterials and biosensors development with Dr. Davis expertise in single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) dispersion and alignment.

 

April 14th 2008: Markhabat Kairova will join us as a new research fellow. She will investigate optical and electrochemical methods for developing biosensors against potato virus.

 

April 1st 2008: We welcome our new postdoctoral researcher Dr. Valber Pedrosa to join our group. He will be involved in several projects including development of enzyme biosensors for specific detection of organophosphate pesticides and toxic chemicals. We also wish our very best for Ainur Sarsenova for her PhD and in future endeavors. She completed her research work at Auburn returned home to continue her PhD.

 

March 28th 2008: Congratulations to Dr. Simonian for receiving  Auburn University Engineering Outstanding Research Faculty 2008

 

March 2008: Congratulations to Sheetal Paliwal for her post-doctoral position with Sanofi-Aventis.

                 

August 2007: We welcome our new members: Ph.D. student Tony Jefferson Gnanaprakasa and  undergraduate Jessica Benton to our group.

 

April 2007: We welcome our new Research Fellow members: Daniyar Jumaniyazov and Ainur Sarsenova.

 

March 2007: We welcome our new Visiting Research Scholar member: Professor Choon Bok Song from Cheju National University, Republic of Korea. He will stay one year with us and will  participate in the development of the method for food pathogens detection by using biosensor technology.

 

August 2006: We welcome our new member Rigved Epur to our group.

 

July 2006: Madhumati Ramanathan graduated with Master of Science and she will be continuing her PhD in our lab. Her research on Array biosensor based on enzyme kinetics monitoring by fluorescence spectroscopy: Application for neurotoxins detection was accepted for publication in Biosensors and Bioelectronics.

 

July 2006: Our manuscript "Enzyme-Encapsulated Silica Monolayers for Rapid Functionalization of a Gold Surface", Heather R. Luckarift, Shankar Balasubramanian, Sheetal Paliwal, Glenn R. Johnson and Aleksandr L. Simonian (invited paper) was accepted for publication in Colloids and Surfaces B: Biointerfaces

 

June 2006: Our invited manuscript "Electrochemical Desorption of Proteins from Gold Electrode Surface", Shankar Balasubramanian, Alexander Revzin, Aleksandr Simonian was accepted for publication in Electroanalysis.

 

May 2006: George Vallone, senior in Aerospace engineering/junior in Mechanical engineering joined our group. He will be working on electrochemical detection of cresols.

 

April 2006: Ms. Sheetal Paliwal was awarded as an Outstanding Graduate Service for the year 2005-2006

 

April 2006: Dr. Gregory Vertelov joined our group as Post Doctoral Fellow. He will be working on discriminative detection of Tri-cresol phosphate (TCP) from aircraft fuels.

 

March 2006: Our manuscript "Lytic phage as a specific and selective probe for detection of Staphylococcus aureus—A surface plasmon resonance spectroscopic study" , Shankar Balasubramanian, Iryna B. Sorokulova, Vitaly J. Vodyanoy and Aleksandr L. Simonian was accepted for publication in Biosensors and Bioelectronics.