The annual MACC conference “MIDD-MACC 2024 – Artificial Intelligence in Analytical Chemistry & Drug Discovery” will be held in the new Chemistry building lobby and lecture hall CHEM 110 Friday, December 6th – Saturday, December 7th. The conference agenda will include workshops from Millipore and Shimadzu as well as presentations from Abhiskek Pandey, Prasenjit Guptasarma, and more. Full agenda can be found here.

Please register for the event here. 

Two dozen faculty and staff of UW-Milwaukee were honored for their distinguished service to the university at the 2024 Employee Excellence Awards ceremony. Chancellor Mark Mone and other speakers praised the winners during a ceremony Wednesday in the ballroom of the UWM Student Union.

Leggy Arnold was awarded the Office of Research Senior Faculty Award.

Leggy Arnold received his PhD in organic chemistry under Nobel laureate Ben Feringa in 2002. He expanded his knowledge in biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, San Francisco and together with Kip Guy established the Department of Chemical Biology and Therapeutics at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Arnold quickly advanced as an expert in the field of vitamin D research and developed potent new anti-tumor agents for ovarian cancer and leukemia. He also developed new drug candidates for asthma, atopic dermatitis and overactive blader syndrome targeting GABA(A) receptor exclusively outside the brain. Together with Douglas Stafford, he established Pantherics Inc. in 2017 and became the director of the Milwaukee Institute for Drug Discovery in 2021. More than a hundred graduate and undergraduate students have been part of the Arnold Group, learning about drug discovery research and continuing on to professional schools, academia and industry.

Two dozen faculty and staff of UW-Milwaukee were honored for their distinguished service to the university at the 2024 Employee Excellence Awards ceremony. Chancellor Mark Mone and other speakers praised the winners during a ceremony Wednesday in the ballroom of the UWM Student Union.

Kristen Murphy was awarded the Faculty Distinguished University Service Award.

Kristen Murphy has been very active in service, particularly in those areas that serve the instructional mission. She has been on the Academic Program and Curriculum Committee since 2015, serving for nine years and chairing or co-chairing for seven years. Murphy also has served on the Academic Planning and Budget Committee, Academic Policy Committee, Faculty Appeals and Grievances Committee and Faculty Senate. Within the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, she has served in many roles with particular pride in developing and supporting the successful chemistry supplemental instruction program. Most recently, Murphy has been involved with the new Chemistry Building, participating in design, planning and operations in her role on the chemistry user group. Finally, she has been active in serving her community – Murphy was recognized in 2023 with induction into the 2023 class of American Chemical Society Fellows (joining about 1,300 out of 170,000 members).

Two dozen faculty and staff of UW-Milwaukee were honored for their distinguished service to the university at the 2024 Employee Excellence Awards ceremony. Chancellor Mark Mone and other speakers praised the winners during a ceremony Wednesday in the ballroom of the UWM Student Union.

Christine Carlson was awarded the Academic Staff Outstanding Teaching Award.

Christine Carlson has been a member of the UWM Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry since 2013, focusing on the instruction of general chemistry.

In addition to teaching three large lectures each semester, Carlson collaborates with other instructors in the department and student advisors to improve student retention and the student experience when taking chemistry courses at UWM. She goes out of her way to learn how students learn best.

Given that the students in the general chemistry sequence spend as much time with graduate teaching assistants as they do with their instructor, Carlson is invested in the instruction of her teaching assistants in new and effective ways to teach, with the ultimate goal to not only ensure that the topics are taught correctly but to also ensure consistency for the students.

Carlson also actively works with the university in recruiting activities. In the last year, she served as a member of the New Directions Freshman Scholarship committee, the Biological Sciences and Chemistry/Biochemistry Preview Day and volunteered for the Natural Sciences Showcase (Fall Welcome event).

Two dozen faculty and staff of UW-Milwaukee were honored for their distinguished service to the university at the 2024 Employee Excellence Awards ceremony. Chancellor Mark Mone and other speakers praised the winners during a ceremony Wednesday in the ballroom of the UWM Student Union.

Doug Stafford was awarded the Ernest Spaights Plaza Award for his accomplishments and contributions.

Douglas Stafford joined UWM in 2011 and served as founding director of the Milwaukee Institute for Drug Discovery (MIDD) until his retirement in 2021. Over this decade he worked tirelessly to advance MIDD into the enduring centerpiece of interdisciplinary research, education and scientific excellence that it is today. He quickly saw that MIDD needed essential research instrumentation and organized a unique public-private partnership that secured over $4 million to establish a world-class analytical chemistry facility, now named the State-of-the-Art Analytical Instrumentation Laboratory and Research Core (SAILARC) within the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, where he served as its executive director.

SAILARC quickly became a cornerstone of MIDD research, and the expert staff Stafford recruited provide unparalleled opportunities for UWM faculty and students across campus to learn, conduct high-level mass spectrometry studies and form collaborations with academic institutions and private industry. Since its formation, over 500 students have been trained using SAILARC instruments, with research included in over 100 PhD and master’s theses. Industry collaborations provided operations support for the core and opened doors for many student internships and future employment.

Stafford also worked to secure several million dollars in grants from the National Institutes of Health and private sources for MIDD researchers, including a Translational Grant program that funded 11 projects where UWM faculty worked collaboratively with local industry partners. His vision for drug discovery infrastructure at UWM included conceiving and advocating for the Kilo Laboratory, a teaching and research facility unique to the region and housed in the new Chemistry Building that will enable new research and collaborations for decades to come based on chemical synthesis using process-scale equipment.

Reaching beyond UWM, Stafford co-founded Bridge-to-Cures Inc., a nonprofit organization that offers financial support, business mentoring and advocacy for new entrepreneurial health care ventures in Wisconsin, notably those arising from academic research.

Chemistry & Biochemistry PhD student Stephen Tochi Nkwocha was highlighted in the Nigerian publication Punch for his efforts to establish chemistry-focused innovation hubs in Nigeria.

Anibal Boscoboinik, who earned his PhD in Chemistry at UWM in 2010 was recently named “Inventor of the Year” by Battelle Memorial Institute. Anibal currently works as a materials scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. Read the full article here.

Professor Shama Mirza received UWM funds to predict responses to anti-VEGF therapy in recurrent glioblastoma

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most aggressive of all brain tumors with limited treatment options and no cure. Even after multimodal treatments by surgical resection of tumor, chemo and radiotherapy, the prognosis is poor (median survival <15 months) and recurrence is inevitable. The recurrent tumors are more aggressive with limited treatment options. Bevacizumab (BV), an anti-VEGF therapy, was recently approved by the FDA as a single agent for the treatment of recurrent GBM. It is believed to be very effective to treat recurring tumors, however, not all patients do respond equally to BV therapy (~40% response rate by standard MRI criteria). Currently, no tissue marker exists to predict which patients will have a therapeutic response, which is crucial for continuous care.

Due to the lack of therapeutic assessment, the current approach is ‘wait and see’. The widespread use, expense, and increased risk of side-effects associated with BV creates a need for the development of a marker to predict therapeutic response prior to starting BV therapy. This discovery would have a tremendous clinical impact. However, even more impactful would be the discovery of alternative therapies for patients who are not expected to benefit from BV as well as for those who eventually fail BV.

Using mass spectrometry-based proteomics approaches, Mirza group proposed to identify prognostic biomarkers to BV therapy a priori in recurrent glioblastoma patients. The findings from the study, supported by the UWM Discovery and Innovation Grant, will provide protein signatures, which can be used to identify patients who will derive the greatest benefit from BV and those who will not, even before therapy has started. This information will enable important clinical decisions regarding the use and treatment of BV, as well as consideration of alternate therapeutic strategies for non-responders. In addition, identifying tumor specific pathways in GBM patients will open avenues to new treatment options.

Students in the UWM Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry voted to award Gloria Freschl the department’s annual “Outstanding Instructor” award in recognition of her work.

The award was presented at the Department’s 2024 Research Symposium.

Nominating students describe her as follows:

“She’s easily my favorite professor and I adore her! She’s so knowledgeable and enthusiastic about chemistry. Her class makes me feel like I’m ready for nursing school the way no other class has at UWM!”

“She did an exemplary job teaching all of us, she was clear and concise. While also throwing laughter here and there, she made learning fun.”