Ishan Barman, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been selected as a recipient of the NIH Directors’ 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 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.