Outreach – Chundawat Research Group

The Chundawat group values and champions the nexus of academic research and university education. We are training the next generation of student scientists and budding engineers in the highly interdisciplinary areas of glycosciences, protein/glycan biophysics, and biochemical engineering at Rutgers University. We constantly strive to create a welcoming environment that also enables scientific curiosity driven learning for students & scholars from diverse backgrounds. Our lab participates in training and outreach activities through various venues and some notable events are highlighted in the figure below.

: Dr. Chundawat, in collaboration with other CBE faculty, has developed audio-visual presentations to help students and visitors learn about chemical engineering as a profession, opportunities at Rutgers CBE, and highlight research activities specifically in the area of carbohydrate-active enzymes, biofuels, & healthcare in general. This material is available on the Rutgers CBE Website (see attached pdf as example). Dr. Chundawat also directed two engineering outreach programs at Rutgers, from July-Aug 2016, supporting over 70 high-school students and their parents providing an overview of opportunities and challenges in the field of chemical engineering by engaging visitors with hands-on experimental activities (e.g., Designing Rutgers CBE Rocket-Car). See pics from these event on Twitter here and here! Finally, Chundawat and student teams have engaged with families at annual Rutgers Day events to demonstrate the impact of chemical engineering on industrialized societies and conduct live chemistry-focused demos to engage students/visitors. Dr. Chundawat also participates in K-12 outreach activities with local New Jersey school students as STEM ambassador as part of the Rutgers NJAES annual summer STEM program.
: Our group has also developed K-16 curriculum for educators to incorporate bioenergy related concepts into their classrooms and has also developed several hands-on STEM focused outreach activities at Rutgers. In particular, our group has developed a cellulosic biofuels and cellulolytic enzymes specific hands-on outreach activity (called ‘Grass-to-Gas’). The original day-long outreach activity was first introduced to a diverse cohort of high school students in the summer of 2016, and also repeated in 2017 (with Rutgers CBE 2018 Senior Benjamin Esposito), as part of the pre-engineering summer academy sponsored by Rutgers University (Division of Continuing Studies). See the pictures from this event on Twitter here! Educational materials prepared for this hands-on activity and survey questions are available for use by the teaching community in general. Detailed bioenergy-specific outreach protocols are accessible to educators and is published online. Further, in collaboration with CBE process engineering laboratory instructor Dr. Alex Bertuccio, we have now successfully introduced a ‘Grass-to-Gas’ inspired lab experiment to engage CBE undergraduate students on cutting-edge bioenergy concepts relevant to biochemical engineering. This new lab was first offered in Spring 2020 (155:416) and will continue to be offered in future UG process lab courses. Finally, Dr. Chundawat served as a research mentor for Mr. Marin Dobson, a biology and biotechnology teacher at Fort Atkinson high school (Wisconsin), as part of the Research Experience for Teachers (RET) program sponsored by the Department of Energy’s Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (DOE-GLBRC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the summer of 2013. All relevant educational material on biomass deconstruction developed in this RET program is made available via the GLBRC Outreach Website.
: The Chundawat lab has developed a novel concentrated ammonia-salt based pretreatment process for enabling biomass conversion to fermentable sugars. This work received media attention and Dr. Chundawat was interviewed on WMBCTV in Jan 2020 to provide details on the ammonia-salt pretreatment and biomass conversion to sugars using engineered enzymes (YouTube Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEoHDRPx8-I). Our group has also received media attention for a novel strategy of negatively supercharging cellulases to reduce enzyme costs for biofuel production. We have also designed various cellulolytic enzymes, both cellulosomal and non-cellulosomal, to reduce enzyme usage for biomass deconstruction into fermentable sugars. See representative images from such press release events.
: The Chundawat lab has developed a novel process analytical toolkit (called N-GLYcanyzer) for enabling continuous monitoring of protein therapeutics drug quality during biomanufacturing. Dr. Chundawat and PhD student Aron Gyorgypal have been interviewed by Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News and various other media outlets on this research. This work was also highlighted as a journal cover article in ACS Analytical Chemistry. See representative images from this work below.
: The Chundawat group likes to also party and socialize outside the lab. See photos from some of these events below. Follow us on Twitter to see what the group’s up to now!