Lisa Volpatti Receives NSF CAREER Award

Northwestern Engineering’s Lisa Volpatti received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the foundation’s most prestigious honor for junior faculty members. CAREER awards go to early-career faculty who demonstrate potential to serve as academic role models in their fields.  

An assistant professor of biomedical engineering and of chemical and biological engineering, Volpatti was one of five University faculty members to earn a CAREER award. The other four were the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences’ Kaize Ding, Feng Ruan, and Jakub Witaszek, and Duri Long from the School of Communication.

Volpatti explores ways to improve the safety and efficacy of immunotherapies by reshaping how cells deliver and experience immune signals. Along with her team, Volpatti engineers proteins and nanomaterials to limit side effects and expand the treatment of immunotherapy drugs. 

With her CAREER award, “Structure-Function Analysis of PEG-Lipid Shedding for Rational Design of Targeted Nanoparticles,” Volpatti will study surface components of nanoparticles to understand how a material’s structure determines its stability. The project will attach nanoparticles with precisely defined surface components to track how the components move and detach from the nanoparticle overtime. This research will help scientists create nanoparticles with surfaces that remain stable and functional in different scenarios. 

“Our lab is interested in understanding what happens to nanomedicines after we put them into complex biological environments, where their surfaces are dynamic rather than static,” Volpatti said. “Inspired by findings from our lab’s first paper, this project will examine how PEG-lipids behave across both polymeric and lipid-based nanoparticles and uncover how molecular structure and nanoparticle architecture together control their retention or shedding.

“We are incredibly grateful for the opportunity to build on this work and establish design principles that can ultimately help us engineer nanomedicines with more predictable behavior in the body.”

Volpatti also will create an education program with local community colleges, in collaboration with the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, to train materials science and engineering students. The partnerships will include hands-on research, mentoring, and scientific programming.