Sam Oliveira, DARPA Young Faculty Awardee
Congratulations to Department of Nanoengineering Assistant Professor Sam Oliveira, who has recently been recognized with a prestigious Young Faculty Award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the US Department of Defense, charged with developing emerging technologies for use by the military. Significantly, it is the first time ever that a faculty member affiliated with NC A&T (and with the JSNN) is honored with such an award.
Dr. Oliveira’s research award ($500,000) is centered on the design of bacterial interspecies interactions and trans-organismic communication in living intercellular circuits. The proposed work involves the development of cutting-edge microfluidic environments (chip networks) to study how mixed microbial populations behave over time, especially under stress like antibiotics or nutrient depletion. Advanced tools like time-lapse microscopy and artificial intelligence (AI) will be used to study how these microbes grow and change in real time.