
Cooking the perfect brisket is a lot like conducting a science experiment. And Dr. Jeremiah Gassensmith should know — he’s both a chemist and backyard barbecue chef.
The challenge is to apply just the right amount of heat and at the right speed to melt proteins called collagen in the meat to transform a tough, muscular cut of beef into a classic Texas delicacy, said
Gassensmith, associate professor of
chemistry and biochemistry at The University of Texas at Dallas.

Yalini Wijesundara stared at the air gun sitting in her lab.
Her lab director, Jeremiah Gassensmith, had built it in a spur of pandemic-induced boredom, shooting table salt around his home office. Once lockdown ended, he brought it to his biochemistry lab and asked Wijesundara to find a research purpose for it.
Wijesundara, then a first-year graduate student at
the University of Texas at Dallas, had just moved to Texas from Sri Lanka. She felt like a fish out of water, still figuring out how the lab worked. Take your time, Gassensmith told her. You’ll figure it out.
Two years later, Wijesundara cracked the code. She brought new life to Gassensmith’s old air gun, creating a system to deliver vaccines with a puff of gas. It’s less painful than traditional needle vaccines, Wijesundara said, comparable to being hit by a Nerf bullet.
The research was published in the journal Chemical Science last year.

New research by University of Texas at Dallas scientists could help solve a major challenge in the deployment of certain COVID-19 vaccines worldwide — the need for the vaccines to be kept at below-freezing temperatures during transport and storage.
In a
study published online April 13 in
Nature Communications, the researchers demonstrate a new, inexpensive technique that generates crystalline exoskeletons around delicate liposomes and other lipid nanoparticles and stabilizes them at room temperature for an extended period — up to two months — in their proof-of-concept experiments.
The Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines use lipid nanoparticles — basically spheres of fat molecules — to protect and deliver the messenger RNA that generates a vaccine recipient’s immune response to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

University of Texas at Dallas researchers are breathing new life into an old MRI contrast agent by attaching it to a plant virus and wrapping it in a protective chemical cage.
The novel strategy is aimed at developing a completely organic and biodegradable compound that would eliminate the need to use heavy metals such as gadolinium in contrast agents, said
Dr. Jeremiah Gassensmith, associate professor of
chemistry and biochemistry in the
School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics and corresponding author of a
study published Feb. 5 in the journal
Chemical Science, a publication of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

When it comes to the way scientists react to their discoveries, “That’s interesting” falls somewhere between “Eureka!” and “Uh-oh.”
“Interesting” is just what Dr. Jeremiah Gassensmith and his graduate student Madushani Dharmarwardana thought when they noticed unusual behavior in a sample of crystals they were working with in Gassensmith’s chemistry lab at The University of Texas at Dallas.
As part of her doctoral research, Dharmarwardana was investigating how the material, from a family of organic semiconducting materials called naphthalene diimides, changes color from orange to yellow as it is heated.