The UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy welcomes Juliane Nguyen, Ph.D., as a new hire in the Division of Pharmacoengineering and Molecular Pharmaceutics.
Nguyen is arriving to UNC as an experienced researcher and lecturer. After completing her Pharmacy degree in 2005 and receiving her license as a board-certified pharmacist in Germany, she earned her Ph.D. at the Phillips-University of Marburg in Germany in 2009, where she focused on drug delivery and polymer chemistry. She then worked for four years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California-San Francisco, where she trained with Dr. Francis Szoka. She started her independent career at the University of Buffalo in 2013, and was promoted to associate professor in 2019.
She received several honors and awards for her work, including the University of Buffalo Exceptional Scholar Young Investigator Award, the NYSTAR faculty award and the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, which is the NSF’s most prestigious honor for early career faculty.
Nguyen runs the Therapeutic Biomaterials Laboratory, which she said focuses on “developing the next generation of materials to treat life-threatening diseases.” The Nguyen lab focuses on using molecules such as proteins, lipids, and RNA-based materials to treat heart attacks and various cancers. She became particularly interested in working with proteins and exosomes because of their versatility and how they can be modified to target and modulate specific cells.
“With genetic engineering, your opportunities are endless,” she said.
In addition to lab work, Nguyen will also lecture on drug delivery and nanomedicine. She is committed to making science discoveries more accessible and has worked with the Young Innovators Program, which gives students from North Carolina schools the chance to participate in a summer research project. Nguyen, along with high school students and graduate students in her lab have created educational YouTube videos that explain some of the biological concepts in her research. This work is funded by the NSF CAREER award.
“We are harnessing the advantages of visualization and animation to teach complex scientific matters to high school students,” Nguyen said. “With animations we can explain difficult scientific concepts in a more understandable way and have the potential to reach a wider audience. We hope this will reduce barriers to choosing science as a career at an early stage and increase retention in STEM related fields.”
Nguyen was also recognized as a 2019 Young Innovator in Cellular and Biomolecular Engineering, a prestigious international recognition from the Biomedical Engineering Society to highlight the research of outstanding young investigators. She was one of 12 faculty members from around the world to receive this award. As part of this award, Nguyen’s article, “Carrier-Free CXCR4-Targeted Nanoplexes Designed for Polarizing Macrophages to Suppress Tumor Growth” was featured in the CMBE journal in August 2019.
She will also give an invited talk in a session highlighting this year’s award winners at the Biomedical Engineering Society in Philadelphia, to be held Oct. 16-19. Nguyen said she is looking forward to having the opportunity to further develop her lab’s technology into clinically viable therapeutics while also collaborating with faculty from the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and the McAllister Heart Institute.