MechE’s Ishan Barman to Receive NIH Director’s New Innovator Award

This award supports unusually innovative research from early career investigators, and is part of the National Institutes of Health’s prestigious High-Risk High-Reward Research program, which was created to support unconventional approaches to major challenges in biomedical and behavioral research. The award supports exceptionally creative early career investigators who propose innovative, high-impact projects in the biomedical, behavioral or social sciences within the NIH mission.

The five-year award will support Barman’s work in developing and deploying a plasmon-enhanced spectroscopic platform that can reveal the interplay between nanoscale deformations and molecular expression in live functioning cells. Understanding such nanomechanical and biochemical cell interactions is essential to gaining insights into the growth and spread of diseases such as metastatic cancer.