Mark Woollam has been part of the Purdue School of Science family since the summer of 2017, as a chemistry and chemical biology PhD student.
Woollam has always enjoyed chemistry but briefly flirted with the idea of communications before being pulled back into the science realm.
His time here at the School of Science has been incredibly productive and transformative as he’s actively involved with several multi-disciplinary research projects with the Integrated Nanosystems Development Institute.
Check out this video to learn more about Woollam’s research involvement.
Description of the video:
I started here in the summer of 2017 as a Ph.D. student in chemistry and chemical biology. A Ph.D. student at I-U-P-U-I back in 2017, she recommended to my research advisor at my undergrad institution that students apply here, so that's how I heard about it. I wanted to apply, I looked at the research and it seemed very interesting. A lot of cool and interesting research going on in the school of science and chemistry in particular so that's what attracted me here. What I've done the most work on is breast cancer biomarkers in mouse urine so that's a project that has three disciplines. We have the biomedical engineers who are injecting tumor cells into mice collecting the urine giving the urine to us, the analytical chemists to perform the chemometrics, and then the engineers for eventual sensor development. Yeah, it's really cool, but long story short, we can tell if mice have cancer, if they have tumors, we can tell different locations of tumors, and we could also tell the effect of treatment as well just by looking at urine so that's really cool. And our latest project actually tracks tumor progression overtime so yeah that there's a lot of different facets of that project and without the biomedical engineers without the Mechanical Engineers and without the analytical chemists it would not be where it is right now. That project is really close to me cause that's what I started out. I've been working on it for all my four years.Woollam is also the recipient of the Elite 50 award, the prestigious PRF Graduate Student Grant award, the IUPUI 2020 Graduate Student Research Scholarship, and has multiple poster awards for research presentations.
Woollam’s two official lead advisors are Mangilal Agarwal, Ph.D., and Frederique Deiss, Ph.D. Woollam also tells us John Goodpaster, Ph.D., and Amanda Siegel, Ph.D. are other important mentors who have helped guide him.
Woollam's full list of research involvement
- Breast cancer urinary VOC biomarker discovery in mice (Dr. Mangilal Agarwal, Dr. Hiroki Yokota, and Dr. Amanda Siegel)
- SPME Fiber Development (Dr. Mangilal Agarwal, Dr. Frederique Deiss, and Dr. Amanda Siegel)
- Prostate Cancer Biomarkers in human urine (Dr. Mangilal Agarwal, Dr. Amanda Siegel, and Dr. Thomas Gardner)
- Volatile markers for cystic fibrosis-associated pulmonary exacerbation in human breath (Dr. Mangilal Agarwal, Dr. Don Sanders, Dr. Michael Davis, and Dr. Amanda Siegel).
- Volatile biomarkers in breath for COVID-19 (Dr. Mangilal Agarwal, Dr. Rajat Kapoor, and Dr. Amanda Siegel)