Rutgers–Camden Doctoral Student Awarded Prestigious Fellowship to Collaborate on Research in France
When Jahmal Ennis discovered he had been selected for a five-month fellowship to France, he sat in complete disbelief.
“I opened up my email and read through it, and I had to read through it maybe three times, I was so excited,” the Center for Computational and Integrative Biology (CCIB) Ph.D. student said. "I'm an adventurous person. I know a lot of people get kind of nervous about these things, but I'm just so excited to be able to go."
This fall, Ennis will attend Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, where he will collaborate with scholars on the computational modeling of gold nanoparticles through the selective Chateaubriand STEM Fellowship, which fosters projects between American and French research teams.
Ennis's research path at Rutgers–Camden is its own collaboration between two labs led by CCIB Director and Physics Professor Grace Brannigan, his doctoral advisor, and Julie Griepenburg, the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Physics.
Ennis works with Griepenburg’s lab, which studies drug delivery systems, including ways to deliver drugs to targeted locations within the body. The idea behind this research is to enclose drug molecules inside vesicles, which are like cellular containers, irradiate the vesicles with a non-invasive light source, and cause them to rupture at a specific location, Ennis explained.
Localizing the drug runs counter to traditional medicines such as chemotherapy, for example, which travels throughout the body and often presents with side effects. “There's currently no real sustainable way to just locally affect a particular area that the cancer is affecting,” Ennis said.
Because the research is new, the best way to vet it is through computation, which Ennis works with in the Brannigan Lab. “I'm kind of the computationalist who gets to simulate, tune these systems, give that information back to the Griepenburg Lab, and she can kind of fine-tune her system based on the information that I observe."
He uncovered a roadblock, however, in studying gold nanoparticles, which are often used in drug delivery, and here, are used to make the vesicles light sensitive.
At a conference with Brannigan, he connected with the French-based Paulo Cesar Telles de Souza, an expert in the Martini coarse-grained (CG) force-field, a leading molecular simulation framework. They began to discuss the absence of gold nanoparticle computational modeling in the field.
“I'm essentially going to France to learn from him and build and design a system for this gold nanoparticle that will be usable not just by me but by other researchers who are interested in gold nanoparticle interactions with various biological materials,” Ennis said.
He believes the fellowship will help the collaborative effort exponentially, expediting the research output, completing the gold model, and setting the groundwork for other materials.
"I think it'll map out that kind of foundation that going forward people can kind of expand upon, because there's now a new way actually to do this that's been laid out for people, now they can kind of take this and use it for different metals and new kinds of systems," Ennis said.
Ennis graduated from Rutgers' New Brunswick campus in 2019 with a degree in biology; after a brief stint in the workforce, a love of learning drew him back to academia. CCIB’s proximity to his hometown in Burlington County and the mix of scientific interests and interdisciplinarity compelled Ennis to attend the program as a graduate student.
"The people and professors were willing to have more open kinds of conversations around science and how we do science, how we do research, and ask, 'What kind of things are you interested in?' rather than saying 'This is what we work on, you either fit in this box or you don't,'" he explained. "That's what I liked a lot about Rutgers–Camden. It seemed like an environment where I could grow."
Though he has visited France before, Ennis looks forward to studying in Lyon and further immersing himself in the culture. An avid snowboarder, he also hopes to take advantage of the country's proximity to Switzerland to take in the Swiss Alps' world-class skiing and snowboarding scene.
The graduate student may still find time during his fellowship to pursue his other longstanding interest in art. Ennis, who has studied painting since high school, views the biological systems he works with as works of art. In his spare time, he has taught himself to use several visualization software platforms to create digital pieces from the molecular simulations in the Brannigan Lab. "I think it shows you kind of this beauty of biology, and you get to kind of see it in a way that I think you never really get actually to see before," he said.
Ennis expects to earn his doctoral degree in early 2028.
