CBE Alumnae Recognized For Their Mentoring Relationship

This is a modified version of an article originally written by Ro Stastny for the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Washington.

Chemical engineering Ph.D. student Sydney Floryanzia (B.S. ’21) and Associate Professor Elizabeth Nance (B.S. ’06) at the University of Washington were recently named among the 2024 HHMI Gilliam Fellowship student-advisor pairs recognized for their collaboration in innovative research and advancing diversity in STEM.

The program, awarded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), fosters a robust scientific community that is committed to advancing equity and inclusion. Through this fellowship, student and advisor pairs are recognized and supported through research funding and professional development opportunities.

The pair’s partnership began 10 years ago when Floryanzia was still in high school. Nance, a postdoc at Johns Hopkins University at the time, invited Floryanzia to shadow her for day and see the nanotechnology-based therapies they were developing for cerebral palsy. The two continued to keep in touch as Floryanzia earned her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at NC State University, where Nance is also an alumna. The mentor who introduced them to each other was Prof. Lisa Bullard, a professor and the department’s Director of Undergraduate Programs.

Their strong mentor-mentee relationship greatly influenced Floryanzia’s decision to pursue a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at UW and join the Nance Lab to create a tunable, physiological microfluidic blood-brain barrier (BBB) model using primary cells. Studying the BBB is critical, as this barrier prevents most molecules of all sizes from accessing the brain, including those from therapeutics that could potentially treat brain disease. Floryanzia’s work in observing and developing living models of brain microvasculature has expanded the Nance Lab’s research and enabled new collaborations with materials scientists and bioengineers.

With the support of this Fellowship, Nance and Floryanzia will be able to continue pushing boundaries both inside and outside of the lab. They have identified an exciting set of goals that will leverage Floryanzia’s BBB expertise and the Nance Lab’s infrastructure to study the ways in which the developing brain responds to stimuli that mimic brain injury in patients.

The CBE Department is extremely proud of all our alumni, especially those that are working on such groundbreaking research inside the lab and pushing boundaries in the field outside of it!