Seed Grant and Travel Awards
EmIRGE-Bio provides financial support opportunities to all trainees in the program. In mid-March, Fellows and Associates were invited to submit applications for up to $1,000 in Travel Award and $4,000 in Seed Grant funding. Twelve graduate students received funding to support conference travel, purchase of research supplies, and summer salary.
Travel Award Recipients:
Amit Pandey, MAE, Dr. Anupam Pandey, Adhesion Society Meeting 2026
John Sackey, CEN, Dr. Jesse Bond, ACS Fall 2026 Conference
Jedidiah Tulu, Dr. Jennifer Schwarz, American Physical Society Global Summit 2026
Haoyang Zhou, Dr. Nidhi Pashine, Golden Research Conference: Granular Matter 2026
Seed Grant Recipients:
Tanya Chhabra, Dr. Lisa Manning, Modeling Cell Differentiation in Epithelia with Different Geometries
Yuman Guo, Dr. Michael Blatchley, Engineering Phototunable Hydrogels to Study How Extracellular Matrix Cues Guide Intestinal Organoid Morphogenesis
Stephen Landry, Dr. Alaji Bah (SUNY Upstate), Elucidating the Mechanism of Thermophilic vs Psychrophilic RNA Pol II CTD Phase Separation via NMR Spectroscopy
Matthew Lesko, Dr. James Henderson, Magnetic Induction Heating of Smart Biomaterial Medical Implants that Can Grow with a Growing Patient
Yashi Li, Dr. Zhen Ma, Engineering Functional Anastomosis Between Perfusable Artificial Capillaries and Cardioid Vasculature
Susan Moradi Nasab, Dr. Zhen Ma, Immunomodulatory Effect of Trophoblast-Derived Extracellular Vesicles
William Ofori-Atta Eghan, Dr. Era Jain, Tunable Co-Delivery of IL-4 and Immunomodulatory Nanoparticles for Temporal Control of Macrophage Polarization in Osteoarthritis
Srijana Pokhrel, Dr. Colm Kelleher, Mitochondrial Energetics and Meiotic Spindle Organization in Mouse MII Oocytes
CV Writing Workshop April 24th, 9am
NRT Seed Grant and Travel Funds Application
The NRT EmIRGE-Bio Program is excited to announce the launch of our application for Seed Grant and Travel Funds. These opportunities are meant to support NRT Fellows and Associates active in research and in good standing with the program.
The NRT seed grant and travel funding will support three types of applications:
- Travel award: up to $1,000
- Seed funding award:
- supplies/equipment/facilities. Up to $4000.
- summer salary. 1, 2, or 3 months of grad student summer salary support can be requested.
Submission deadline is Friday, April 17th , 2026, for Seed grant funding while travel funding is on a rolling basis.
NSF NRT EmIRGE-Bio Seed Grant and Travel Funds Application– Use this link to apply.
Student Led Abstract Workshop-March 27th
NRT students hosted a peer led graduate student abstract workshop. This workshop provided graduate students with the Dos and Don’ts of abstract writing before they grouped up to provide peer feedback on one another’s abstracts. The event began with research presentations by two of our Fellows.
NSF RESEARCH TRAINEESHIP ANNUAL MEETING
Members of our NRT community recently attended the NRT Annual Meeting in Golden, CO. The 2026 NRT Annual Meeting convenes the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship community of PIs, co-PIs, project coordinators, evaluators, and graduate student trainees involved in active NRT projects.
Our Co-PI Carlos Castaneda, NRT Fellow Anton Jayakodiarachchige, and Program Coordinator David Stablein represented EmIRGE-Bio at the conference. They joined workshop sessions where best practices and ideas were shared to strengthen the networks of researchers and the scholarly impact of NRT projects across the United States.
Anton also presented his research, Investigating Strain-level Stress Tolerance of Mediterraneibacter gnavus in the Small Intestine, during one of the graduate student poster sessions.
February 2026
Accepting Applications for Fellows 2026-2027
The NSF NRT EmIRGE-BIO is currently accepting Fellowship Applications.
- Student Eligibility:
- Domestic student with US citizenship – AND –
- First-year graduate students who are currently enrolled in the related program/department.
- Incoming applicants for this PhD admission cycle.
- Nomination Process:
- The existing first-year graduate student or incoming applicants will be nominated by the fellowship committee member in each department.
- Students who would like to self-nominate should contact the fellowship committee member in each department.
- Maximum of 3 graduate students can be nominated by each department.
- If there are more than 3 nominations (self-nominations or nominations by faculty), the fellowship committee member is responsible for determining which 3 move forward.
- The departmental correspondence is required to complete the nomination form and provide the first-year transcripts and CVs of all nominees.
- The nominations are due by Wednesday March 5th.
- The fellowship awardees from all the nominations will be determined by the NRT fellowship committee.
- The existing first-year graduate student or incoming applicants will be nominated by the fellowship committee member in each department.
Contact bioinspirednrt@syr.edu for the official nomination form.