Professor Geyou Ao Earns Prestigious NSF CAREER Award

Dr. Geyou Ao “Augyu”, an assistant professor of chemical and biomedical engineering at Cleveland State University, has been awarded a five-year, $609,147 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, the highest recognition NSF gives to early-career faculty. The funding will allow her to establish the fundamental properties and potential antimicrobial applications of new hybrid materials of glycopolymer-complexed boron nitride nanomaterials.

Carbohydrate-mediated interactions are involved in many cellular events, including immune responses and infections. Ao, will engineer carbohydrate-decorated nanomaterials, that are known as glyconanomaterials, and study their synergistic nanoscale and carbohydrate interactions with microbes. Ao has been working with carbon nanomaterials her entire scientific career. Since joining CSU, she has launched a new research project on glyconanomaterials in collaboration with Xue-Long Sun, Professor of Chemistry at CSU. Engineered glyconanomaterials potentially have significantly enhanced multivalency and specificity toward carbohydrate-binding bacterial proteins and toxins. Controlled fabrication of glyconanomaterials across multiple length scales will enable many applications, such as biosensors of microbes and antimicrobial coatings for improving indoor air quality, addressing the nation’s health grand challenges.