Adapted from the College of Engineering News
Congratulations to Robert Kobrin ’24! He received the Senior Award for Scholarly Achievement from the College of Engineering. Seniors are nominated by their respective academic departments in the College of Engineering, and winners are chosen by a selection committee made up of faculty and staff members in the College. Departmental nominees were honored during a ceremony held at the James B. Hunt Jr. Library on NC State’s Centennial Campus where the four COE winners were also announced.
As a student in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering, Robert Kobrin is already working on important research in his field. Since 2021, Robert has worked in the ImmunoEngineering lab at NC State, where he created and parameterized a novel chitosan-glycerol gel to provide increased retention of injected immunotherapeutics compared to lab standard practices. He considers his time at the lab a cornerstone of his education.
Additionally, Robert has developed three cutting-edge flexible nanobiosensors and helped bridge two labs, leading to four other students working abroad. His research efforts led to a Goldwater nomination, co-authorship of manuscripts in Biosensors & Bioelectronics and Cryobiology, first-authorship in IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology and a second developing manuscript.
Outside of the lab, Robert has led the Helping Hands Project in developing 20 pediatric prosthetics and will graduate with highest honors for a thesis on developing a low-cost prosthetic that contains adjustable grip patterns, improving outcomes for pediatric patients.
Robert has held multiple teaching assistant appointments, interned at The Center for Bionic Medicine at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago and fostered an interdisciplinary background through his history and Spanish minors in his time at NC State. In the summer of 2022, he completed a 10-week research internship at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, gaining experience and understanding of similarities and differences between research cultures.
This fall, Robert is heading to the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering to work towards a Ph.D. in Bioengineering in the lab of Dr. Joe Wang as an NSF GRFP Fellow with a focus on microrobotics for drug delivery.