Recent Ph.D. graduates Sina Jamalzadegan and Sobhana Sripada have been selected as the winner and honorable mention recipients, respectively, of the 2025 James K. Ferrell Outstanding Ph.D. Graduate Award. 

The award recognizes an outstanding graduate of the department’s doctoral program who distinguished themselves in scholarship through publications, research-based honors and presentations, as well as in service through teaching and teaching assistant performance, graduate student recruiting, Graduate Student Association service and the mentorship of peers and undergraduate researchers. The award is named in memory of James K. Ferrell, the first Ph.D. graduate from NC State’s chemical engineering program in 1954 before serving as a faculty member and department head from 1966-1980.

Sina Jamalzadegan

Sina is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California-Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, a global leader in computational genomics. Building on his doctoral research, he is developing agentic AI systems that learn from and reason about complex biological data for application with brain organoid models at the interface of chemical engineering, artificial intelligence and computational biology.

Looking ahead, his goal is to lead a chemical engineering research group as a university faculty member. He wants to use his expertise in materials science and biology to accelerate the discovery of new functional materials and decoding complex biological systems for human and plant health. 

Sina was advised by Professor Qingshan Wei while at NC State. “My four years there were among the most memorable of my life, and I will always be proud to be part of the Wolfpack,” he said. “I am deeply grateful to my advisor for his guidance and belief in me, and the faculty, especially Professors Dickey and Simon, and the award committee for selecting me for his honor.”

According to Prof. Wei, “Sina is a self-driven, innovative and deeply collaborative engineer with the vision, skill set and character to be a future faculty.”

His dissertation, “Advancing Biosensors Through Computational Modeling, Artificial Intelligence, and CRISPR,” combined machine learning, liquid-metal nanomaterials and CRISPR technology to build point-of-care HIV diagnostics and wearable sensors that detect plant disease up to 10 days before symptoms appear. 

Sobhana Sripada

Sobhana is currently a senior process development engineer at Alexion, AstraZeneca Rare Disease. She is responsible for conventional and high-throughput early-stage process development specifically tailored for viral vector gene therapies. She also drives crucial drug substance scale-up and technology transfer initiatives and cultivates next-generation technology development. 

In the future, she wants to lead teams to innovate bioseparations and processes using digital technologies that enables efficient development of biotherapeutics and quicker clinic uptake. 

Sobhana was advised by Professor Stefano Menegatti while at NC State. “NC State is where I learned the importance of and how to ask the right questions,” she said. Her primary research focused on the development of matrices for selective capture of host-cell proteins from a variety of cell cultures for product-agnostic, continuous therapeutic purification platforms.  

According to Prof. Menegatti, Sobhana “has invented technology that will be used in the manufacture of therapies for real patients; she has published more rigorously and more broadly than most scientists twice her age; and she has demonstrated the instincts of an industry leader.”

Congratulations to both of these alumni on this recognition!

Funds for the award are made possible through the James K. Ferrell Graduate Student Memorial Fund.