Congratulations to Prof. Jianjun Wei from the Department of Nanoscience for receiving a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation’s Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental and Transport Systems (CBET) Division in the Engineering Directorate. The project, entitled “Excellence in Research: A PEC-AbP Dual Signal Amplification Method and its Mechanistic Study of Signal Transduction for DNA Sensing”, is a collaborative effort with Prof. Peng He in the Department of Chemistry at NC A&T State University. The joint project is funded by the Historically Black Colleges and Universities–Excellence in Research (HBCU-EiR) program, which aims to strengthen research capacity at HBCUs. Significantly, it combines Dr. Wei’s expertise on plasmon–exciton coupling effects (“plexcitonics”) with Dr. He’s research on the development of amplification-by-polymerization (AbP) methods for DNA sensing.