Research, Education & Innovation Summit

Celebrating 10 Years of Groundbreaking Research
Please join us to celebrate our members’ accomplishments and the tenth anniversary of the CMI!
Friday, August 15, 2025
11:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m.
Friday Institute for Educational Innovation
This year’s event will again be a combined event with the with “Think, Collaborate & Do” Ideation Event in the morning and the Summit in the afternoon. To participate in the Ideation Event, you must register separately using the button below.
We are also seeking Associate Member volunteers to help run the event. To find out more or to sign up, use the “Volunteer” button below, or contact Valerie Baker at valerie.baker@ncsu.edu.

Summit Agenda
- 11:30-12:50 Lunch, Guest Speaker Keynote Address
- 12:45-12:55 Intro to Afternoon Session
- 12:55-1:25 Division Focus–Clinical & Translational Sciences
- 1:25-1:55 Division Focus–Data Enabled Modeling
- 1:55-2:15 Entrepreneurship Highlights
- 2:15-3:00 Poster Session 1
- 3:00-3:30 Division Focus–Engineered Biomedical Systems
- 3:30-4:00 Poster Session Group 2
- 4:00-4:20 Education: YSP & SIRI Student Highlights
- 4:20-4:30 Awards Presentation
- 4:30-5:00 Poster Breakdown
- 4:30-6:00 Social Hour (Off Campus)
Please Note: The Friday Institute has ample free parking for event attendees. However, please be aware of school-time traffic at the adjacent middle school.
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Ankur Singh

Ankur Singh is a Carl Ring Family Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology with a joint appointment in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. At Georgia Tech, he serves as the Director of the Center for Immunoengineering. Before Georgia Tech, he was a tenured Associate Professor at Cornell University. He is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. His laboratory develops immune organoids and enabling technologies to understand both healthy and diseased immune cells and translate these findings into therapeutics. He has received funding from the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, Wellcome Leap HOPE, Department of Defense, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Curci Foundation, and the Lymphoma and Leukemia Society. He has published >80 articles in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature Methods, Nature Materials, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Immunology, Nature Communications, Nature Reviews Materials, Nature Protocols, Science Advances, Cell Reports, PNAS, Blood, and Advanced Materials. He has written multiple editorials for Science Translational Medicine. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER, Society for Biomaterials Mid Career Award, Society for Biomaterials Young Investigator Award, CMBE Young Innovator Award, CMBE Rising Star Award, 3M Faculty Award, DoD Career award, Georgia Tech CIOS Teaching Award, Cornell’s Teaching Excellence Award, and Cornell’s Research Excellence Award. His immune organoids were identified among the Top 100 Discoveries of 2015 by Discover Magazine. He is the Founder and past Chair of the Immune Engineering SIG at the Society for Biomaterials and Controlled Release Society. He currently serves as the Associate Editor for Science Advances, Biomaterials, and Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering. Dr. Singh serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) Chicago Biohub.
Revolutionizing Immunotherapy: Bioengineered Immune Organs and Nanoscale Technologies
The human immune system is a marvel of biological complexity, yet its dysfunction underlies numerous diseases. Designing vaccines, immunomodulatory drugs, and cell therapies against infections, cancer, inflammatory conditions, and age-related disorders requires a detailed understanding of how immune cells form and activate in primary, secondary, and ectopic tertiary immune organs. Traditionally, research on the immune system has been restricted to in vivo approaches, which do not allow for the detailed control of intracellular and extracellular processes, and to 2D in vitro models, which lack physiological relevance. These models are being investigated to understand immune function and dysfunction at the cellular, tissue, and organ levels. In this talk, I will discuss my laboratory’s effort in developing synthetic, human ex vivo immune organoids to replicate the structure and function of immune tissues. I will discuss strategies to combine engineered materials and immune cells from individuals to generate antibody-secreting cells in a dish or as organ-on-chip against viral and bacterial infections and describe immunogenicity testing efforts. I will further describe the use of human immune organoids in oncology and drug development space, and subsequently describe the integration of immune organoids with complex mucosal organ-on-chip technologies, with applications in inflammation, infection, and oncology. Complementing this, I will introduce nanoengineered wires functionalized with cationic polymers to program naive T cells without pre-activation, a critical advancement for adoptive T-cell therapies. By delivering single or multiple microRNAs, I will describe how nanowires modulate T-cell fitness, influencing proliferation, phenotypic differentiation, and effector molecule secretion. These programmed T cells exhibit enhanced in vivo protection against intracellular pathogens, with tailored differentiation into T cell subtypes.
Poster Sessions
All CMI Members & Associate Members are invited to present a poster. Sign up by Friday, August 8th if you would like to present your work using the link below.
**SIRI, U-TEAM, and AHA Undergraduates are required to participate in the poster competition.** Other undergraduate and graduate trainees are strongly encouraged to participate as well, but are not required.
Questions? Email Valerie Baker (compmedinst@ncsu.edu)