Fourth year UW Bioengineering Ph.D. student Nuttada Panpradist of Associate Professor Barry Lutz’s lab has received a 2017 UW Medicine Bud Tribble and Susan Barnes Graduate Discovery Fellowship. The fellowship program provides Ph.D. students enrolled in UW Medicine programs the opportunity to pursue creative external learning experiences with a mentor other than their UW PI. The fellowships allow students to explore fundamentally new avenues of inquiry and broaden their vision of science prior to pursuing independent careers. Nuttada is the first recipient of a Graduate Discovery Fellowship in BioE.
The award will provide Nuttada with $40,000 to pursue a six month fellowship, and to cover her stipend, tuition, housing and travel.
Nuttada will work with Dr. Shirit Einav at Stanford University, where she will investigate the dynamics of immune responses and gene expression in the course of natural dengue infection. The work aims to discover biomarkers that will inform the development of more effective diagnostics and therapies.
In her Ph.D. work at UW, Nuttada is developing a diagnostic device that can diagnose HIV and detect drug resistance. The device addresses the emerging threat of HIV resistant to antiretroviral therapy (ART), especially in the developing world where first-line diagnostic technology is out of reach. In 2016, she received a $50,000 third place APF Student Technology Prize for Primary Healthcare, which allowed her to advance proof-of-concept work of her device and conduct a pilot study. With her project at Stanford, Nuttada hopes to gain skills that will allow her to further develop and translate diagnostic technologies from the lab to clinical practice.
Students interested in applying for the Graduate Discovery Fellowship in the future may view the application guidelines online at the UW Medicine website.