The Simpson Querrey Institute (SQI) will provide educational tours to groups of high school students on July 2 and July 16 through the National Student Leadership Conference on Biotechnology hosted by Northwestern University.

Two postdoctoral fellows at Northwestern — the husband-and-wife team of J. Alberto Ortego and Zaida Alvarez-Pinto — have helped form a lasting collaboration between their principal investigators: SQI faculty members Samuel Stupp and Evangelos Kiskinis.

A research team led by SQI faculty member Michael Jewett is using low-cost, high-tech biology kits to teach advanced topics such as gene editing and antibiotic resistance to high school students.

Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day was celebrated across the United States on April 25, but few itineraries could have matched the variety offered by SQI, the Northwestern University Prosthetics-Orthotics Center (NUPOC), and the Northwestern Center for Translational Imaging (CTI).

SQI faculty member Nathan Gianneschi and former graduate student Andrea Carlini demonstrated a novel strategy to repair damage caused by a heart attack. The minimally invasive technique involves delivering a bioactivated, biodegradable, regenerative substance through a catheter.

A cross-disciplinary team co-led by Center for Bio-Inspired Electronics (CBIE) director John A. Rogers has tackled a problem for babies in NICU units by creating clinical-grade, wireless, soft sensors.

A new wearable sensor that connects to smartphone games — developed in part by Center for Bio-Integrated Electronics director John A. Rogers — may improve access to electromyography biofeedback for patients with incomplete paraplegia. Recording the electrical activity of muscles (electromyography) has been shown to enhance the recovery of muscle control in people with incomplete spinal cord injuries, but access to the therapy is limited by its high cost and requirement for trained operators. This innovation could overcome those hurdles and allow patients to self-dose this type of treatment.

SQI faculty member Jonathan Rivnay has been selected as a 2019 Sloan Research Fellow in Chemistry from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Dr. Jason Wertheim was recently featured in Crain’s Chicago Business for his research into growing new kidneys.

SQI’s Peptide Synthesis Core received the 2018 Outstanding Core Facility Award, sponsored by Northwestern University’s Office for Research. Only three core facilities at Northwestern received this designation.

Samuel Stupp, director of the Simpson Querrey Institute, was elected as a 2018 fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. This distinction is reserved for academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society.

John A. Rogers has received the 2019 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Materials Engineering “for pioneering the engineering of flexible and stretchable electronic systems for e-health and exploratory neuroscience."

The Simpson Querrey Institute has joined the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI)|BioFabUSA, a public-private network of leading manufacturers, universities, nonprofit organizations and the federal government looking to develop scalable manufacturing processes for engineered tissues and organs.

SQI faculty members Samuel Stupp, John Rogers and Mark Hersam were named to the Highly Cited Researchers 2018 List by Clarivate Analytics, which compiled the list by identifying researchers with multiple papers ranking in the top 1 percent of citations for their field and year. Two other Northwestern faculty members associated with SQI's research centers were also recognized: Chad Mirkin (Center for Bio-Inspired Energy Science) and Yonggang Huang (Center for Bio-Integrated Electronics).

Guillermo Ameer has been elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Ameer will be honored for his contributions to the fields of biomaterials science, tissue engineering and regenerative engineering, particularly for pioneering the development and applications of citrate-based biomaterials, at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., in February.

Samuel Stupp received a $3.1 million NIH grant to explore a novel solution to bone regeneration and spine fusion. The research team includes SQI members Erin Hsu, Wellington Hsu and Stuart Stock, and an SQI faculty participant at the University of Southern California, Malcolm Snead. Bone is the second-most transplanted tissue in the United States, with between 1.6 million and 2 million surgeries performed each year. More than 500,000 of these procedures involve spine fusions, which often use autograft bone — bone taken from the patient — and it may be unavailable for various reasons.

Fascinated by black widow spiders, which are known to produce an array of silks with exceptional properties, Nathan Gianneschi and his collaborators at San Diego State University have unraveled the complex process of how these spiders transform proteins into steel-strength fibers. This knowledge promises to aid scientists in creating equally strong synthetic materials.

John A. Rogers will receive the 2018 MRS Medal from the Materials Research Society. The MRS Medal recognizes a major advance or cluster of closely related advances in any materials-related field of research over the past 10 years.

SQI ­member and Center for Bio-Integrated Electronics director John A. Rogers announced the successful development of the first example of a bioresorbable electronic medicine: an implantable, biodegradable wireless device that speeds nerve regeneration and improves the healing of damaged nerves.