Submit Your Research Project
Calling all faculty members to submit a research project that undergraduate students can be a part of.
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“I chose bioengineering because I wanted to invest my time and effort in doing something that will eventually improve people's lives.”
All bioengineering undergraduate students have the opportunity to work with talented faculty in a research setting at Mason.
Available Research Projects
The following lab research projects are available for Bioengineering Undergraduates for the Spring 2022 term.
If you are interested, please click the faculty name and email them explaining why you are interested, what time you have available for the project and also include your CV and transcript.
You can also read about our research areas at https://bioengineering.gmu.edu/research
Messenger RNA Therapeutics
Faculty Member: Michael Buschmann
Lab Location: Institute for Advanced Biomedical Studies (IABR) SciTech Campus
Project 1: Synthesis of novel lipids for mRNA Delivery using substitution reactions
Project 2: Characterization of electrophoretic mobility of mRNA lipid nanoparticles
Project 3: Measurement of delivery efficiency of mRNA lipid nanoparticles in cell cultures
Biomaterials and Nanomedicine
Faculty Member: Caroline Hoemann
Lab Location: Institute for Advanced Biomedical Studies (IABR) SciTech Campus
Project 1: Peripheral blood innate immune responses to nanomaterials
Project 2: Ultrasound imaging of cartilage-bone tissues from healthy and arthritic joints
Neural Engineering
Faculty member: Nathalia Peixoto
Location: Fairfax campus (Nguyen Engineering and Peterson Hall)
Project 1: Combination of electroencephalography and virtual reality to predict subject’s emotional state.
Project 2: Mechanisms of memory formation and training in neural networks.
Project 3: Neuromorphic hardware development.
Faculty Member: Giorgio Ascoli
Project 1: Hippocampome
The student will learn to identify dendritic and axonal morphologies, microscopy techniques for their visualization, how they relate to the surrounding nervous tissue, and their effect on neuronal activity and network function.
Project 2: NeuroMorpho.org
The student will learn to identify dendritic and axonal morphologies, microscopy techniques for their visualization, how they relate to the surrounding nervous tissue, and their effect on neuronal activity and network function.
Spatial Cognition
Faculty Member: Holger Dannenberg
Lab Location: Krasnow Building at the Fairfax Campus
Project 1: Investigating learning and memory by recording neural activity in freely behaving rodents
Project 2: Investigating the functional role of the neuromodulator acetylcholine during memory-guided behavior.
Project 3: Using deep learning methods to analyze neural activity during memory-guided behavior in freely behaving rodents.

Bioengineering students Luz Vargas Restrepo (middle) and Meena Alzamani pose with Juan Cebral, bioengineering professor. They were on campus to discuss bioengineering projects and ongoing research during Engineers Week.