<aside> 💡 We build tools that help people know, as quickly and as close to home as possible, whether their medication is working as intended.

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News

May 2026: Congratulations to our Mechanical Engineering capstone student team (Mia Gorman, Enzo Burt, Sean McMichael, Mira Khardon, and Ron Zuckerman) for presenting their work on the Candy Collect project at the ME Capstone fair! Thank you to Yobel Abraham for your work mentoring this project & supporting the lab!
May 2026: Congratulations to undergraduate students Lia Hassan, Angelina Pamatian, Rebecca Dion, Ravi Sevalia, Sofia Solari, and Linda Guo for presenting their research projects at the UW Undergraduate Symposium. Thank you for your curiosity in science, passion in the lab’s projects, and contributions in driving forward accessible tools for biomedical solutions!

May 2026: We received an **NIH R01 Grant 🥳** for our work on providing drug level feedback for HIV-Reverse Transcriptase (HIV-RT) inhibitors. This grant will fund expansion of our REverse Transcriptase ACTivity (REACT) assay to provide measurement of clinically relevant RT inhibitors used for HIV treatment in adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) in sub-Saharan Africa, with AGYW in sub-Saharan Africa accounting for 1 in 4 new HIV infections globally! Alongside our collaborators Dr. Barry Lutz, Dr. Kenneth Mugwanya, and Dr. Jillian Pintye, we will optimize REACT to measure clinically relevant levels of the NRTIs and NNRTIs tenofovir-diphosphate (TFV-DP), emtricitabine-triphosphate (FTC-TP), doravirine (DOR), rilpivirine (RPV), and dapivirine (DPV) using banked clinical samples from AGYW in the studies from Dr. Mugwanya (R01AI155086, HIV treatment) and Dr. Pintye (R01HD108041, HIV prevention). We will also expand the assay’s capabilities to utilize freeze-dried reagents and the Harmony portable device (develped by Dr. Lutz), thereby moving it closer to point-of-care testing. Our team is excited to start this work alongside our collaborators (and friends) and honored to receive the funding to move it along!
April 2026: Willow Chernoske received an Institute for Translational Health Sciences TL-1 predoctoral award for their work on measuring medication levels for people infected with cytomegalovirus (CMV). Congratulations, Willow!
April 2026: Kelsey Leong presented her research on patient-centered point-of-care monitoring of immunosuppressants for transplant recipients at the ACTS Translational Science Conference. Kelsey was selected as a featured presentation along with fellow ITHS fellowship colleagues for top-50 posters. Way to go, Kelsey!
April 2026: Maya Singh shared her research focused on a rapid and inexpensive measurement of HIV medication adherence at the Science Now talk at the Seattle Town Hall as a part of her UW ENGAGE course, which focuses on science communication!

April 2026: Willow Chernoske passed their PhD qualifying exam! Thank you to their committee members (Dr. Kim Woodrow, Dr. Barry Lutz, and Dr. Alpana Waghmare) for their support and feedback.
March 2026: Annie Li joined our lab a PhD student in the Molecular Engineering program! She will be working on our Mini Mass Spec project. Welcome, Annie!
March 2026: Ayọ̀kúnlé Ọlánrewájú presented the lab’s work on rapid enzyme activity assays at the RICE360 Institute for Global Health Technologies Seminar Series as an invited speaker. Thanks for leading the work and continually expanding our network, Ayo!

February 2026: Carrie Lin, Dorothy (Dot) Mims, and Annie Li attended the 33rd Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Denver, CO, where Carrie presented a poster on her work integrating lateral flow readout with the REACTR assay for providing point-of-care drug level measurement of long term HIV medication adherence using tenofovir-diphosphate (TFV-DP). After the conference, the attendees also got the opportunity to spend a day talking science and touring facilities with our collaborators in Dr. Pete Anderson’s lab at CU Anschutz!