Dr. Abigail Koppes-
Principal Investigator

Brent Buchinger

Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disease, characterized by progressive losses in motor control and cognitive functioning. While recent work has hinted at a gut origin, research elucidating the mechanisms for this pathological pathway is lacking. Brent’s work aims to develop a novel microphysiological system mimicking the gut-brain axis with the goal of improving platforms for studying and understanding Parkinson’s disease.

Brent joined ABNEL in the summer of 2022 as a Chemical Engineering PhD student. Prior to his graduate studies at Northeastern University, Brent worked as an analytical chemist at Eurofins Food Integrity & Innovation. He obtained his BS in Chemical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in December of 2019. At his undergraduate institution, Brent’s research focused on catalysis. However, his passions switched to biomedical engineering after researching chondrogenic differentiation at Case Western Reserve University in the summer of 2018.

B.S. Chemical Engineering
University of Wisconsin–Madison ’19
Madison, WI

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Minhal Named a Mitchell Scholar

Minhal was named a Mitchell Scholar, Northeastern’s first, where he will pursue his masters under Professor John Cryan at University College Cork.  

Dr. Koppes, Sanjin, and Adam Present at 2018 AIChE Annual Meeting

Dr. Koppes gave a plenary talk discussing ABNEL’s work on the gut-brain axis as part of WIC’s 20th Anniversary collection of talks celebrating promoting Women in Chemical Engineering. Conference proceedings can be found here. Sanjin gave a platform talk presenting his work towards developing novel in-vitro microfluidic gut models. Conference proceedings can be found here. […]