Recent News

Congratulations, Kate Goncalves, for winning the James Manner Poster Award at Pittcon 2025! Kate attended her first conference and presented her work on the “Analysis of Vaginal Fluid using Raman Spectroscopy.” Her work focuses on identifying differences in vaginal microbiome pertaining to race and ethnicity, pre-and-post menopause, sexual activity, and… Read More

At the recent SPIE Photonics West held at the end of January 2025, the Locke Lab had a strong presence with 4 oral presentations and 1 poster presentation. Graduate students Anna Rourke-Funderburg and Huijin ‘Ginny’ An presented updates to their PhD projects. Alec Walter, post-doctoral fellow, gave an oral presentation… Read More

After a semester of rotations, 3 new PhD students in the Chemistry department have joined the Locke lab. Kauryn Datcher, Darby Heffer, and Madison Walker join the lab to purse their PhDs under the direction of Dr. Locke. Read More

On November 4, 2024, Locke lab undergraduate researchers Sophia Juarez and Kate Goncalves gave poster presentations to the Vanderbilt community at the Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Fair (VURF) detailing their recent work in the Locke lab. Sophia gave an update on her work toward developing a paper-based surface-enhanced Raman… Read More

At the recent SciX 2024 conference hosted in Raleigh, NC at the end of October 2024, Dr. Locke gave an update on the exciting work in the lab titled “Culture-free Detection of Bacteria in Biofluids” and hosted the Women in Analytical Science panel. For this panel, Dr. Locke organized a… Read More

Sophia Juarez, an undergraduate student in the Locke lab and SyBBURE Undergraduate Research Fellow, attended the annual BMES conference in October 2024 and presented her research titled “Design of a paper-based surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy substrate for bacteria detection in biofluid”. Read More

Congratulations to Jeremiah Johnson, a @VandyBME undergraduate student working in the @BiosensingLocke lab, on receiving first place for his poster at the 20th Annual Tennessee #LSAMP Undergraduate Research Conference. Read More

A recent publication by PhD Candidate Anna Rourke-Funderburg was chosen for 2 special editions in Analyst. Anna’s article titled “Characterization of vaginal Lactobacillus in biologically relevant fluid using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy” was chosen as an Analyst HOT Article and selected for the 150th Anniversary Collection: Raman Spectroscopy and SERS. Read… Read More

PhD candidate Anna recently attended the International Conference on Raman Spectroscopy (ICORS) in Rome, Italy, and presented an update on her project titled “Detection of vaginal Lactobacillus using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy”. Read More