Associate Professor Shikha Nangia’s research on the blood-brain barrier is prominently featured on the cover of the Aug. 2 Journal of Physical Chemistry B. The paper, “Self-Assembly Simulations of Classic Claudins—Insights into the Pore Structure, Selectivity, and Higher Order Complexes,” is authored by Nangia and a team of students and alumni, including current graduate student Flaviyan Jerome Irudayanathan G’19, Xiaoyi Wang G’16, Nan Wang G’16, Sarah R. Willsey ’18 and Ian A. Seddon, who participated in an REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) at the Syracuse Biomaterials Institute in the summer of 2015.
Nangia’s research seeks to identify ways to temporarily open the tight junction barriers to allow disease-fighting medicines to reach tissues in noninvasive ways. Additionally, Nangia’s research group focuses on designing efficient nanosized drug delivery carriers to target cancerous tumor cells in the brain. Nangia was awarded $580,000 from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program, which funds her blood-brain barrier research.
Nangia has been a biomedical and chemical engineering professor in the Department of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering since 2012. She teaches chemical and statistical thermodynamics and has been awarded the ECS Dean’s Award for Excellence in Education, a Meredith Teaching Recognition Award, the College Technology Educator of the Year, a Faculty Excellence Award and the Outstanding Junior Faculty Award by the American Chemical Society. She earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Delhi, a master’s in chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
