Zachary Barber has been granted the 2018 Outstanding Undergraduate Student Researcher Award. Barber attended the award luncheon earlier this week alongside Dr. Darrell Davis and Dr. Hamid Ghandehari of the College of Pharmacy.

Dr. Hamid Ghandehari of the Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Chemistry department nominated the talented undergrad for this award, as Barber has been a large asset in the success and productivity of Dr. Ghandehari's lab. Barber began working in Dr. Ghandehari's lab his freshman year of college, and has since dedicated 15+ hours of his week to working on the lab's silica nanorattle toxicity project, was awarded UROP funding to continue his research, and has presented his research at various reputable conferences. The conferences include the Undergraduate Research Symposium at the University of Utah in 2017, the 2017 Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) annual meeting in Phoenix, and the 2017 Utah Bioengineering Conference (UBEC). Barber is second author on a paper that was recently submitted to the ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, and is currently developing a novel embolic for the treatment of juvenile nasopharyngeal angiofibroma as his senior thesis project in collaboration with Dr. Jeremiah Alt, MD, PhD of the Department of Surgery.

Dr. Ghandehari states "Zach has shown that he is more than capable of coming up with creative experimentation approaches, as exemplified by his contributions to the experimental design of the nanorattles project and nanoparticle density measurements. Zach has been an exceptional undergraduate researcher."