Staff

Corrine Hornbeck joined Notre Dame Research in 2016 and currently serves as the Program Coordinator for the Berthiaume Institute for Precision Health.

Prakash is a nanoparticle engineer (h-index 25; i10-index 35) with more than 15 years of multidisciplinary experience in nanomaterial synthesis, biomedical imaging, cancer biology, nanotoxicology, and targeted therapeutics/diagnostics. He is the Associate Director of the Berthiaume Institute for Precision Health, the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute navigator for Notre Dame, and an Assistant Professor of Practice. He is open to collaborations, partnerships, and consulting opportunities.

The driving force behind his research is making nanoparticle-based technologies accessible to all research groups. Drawing on his interdisciplinary expertise with nanoscale sensor materials, Prakash investigates intercellular trafficking and defense mechanisms in abnormal cells (e.g., cancer, multidrug-resistant bacteria) with the goal of exploiting this knowledge for early detection and targeted therapies. His secondary research interests include nanotoxicology and scaling up nanomaterial synthesis from lab scale to pilot scale, with a niche focus on anisotropic and Janus nanoparticles. His tertiary interests involve applying plasmonic nanomaterials to metamaterials, sensors, and imaging probes.

Prakash has received multiple awards as a consultant for InnoCentive (a crowdsourced initiative founded by former Eli Lilly scientists) and is a successful recipient of federal research grants from the DoD and DHA in an academic setting. His combined experience in industry, academia, and consulting gives him a diverse skill set, making him highly adaptable and effective both independently and in team-based environments. He has published more than 37 peer-reviewed journal articles, which have been cited over 3,150 times, co-authored one book chapter, holds one patent from seven applications, and independently funds and co-advises bioengineering Graduate Research Assistants in their dissertation research.

Matthew J. Webber, the Keating-Crawford Collegiate Professor of Engineering and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Notre Dame, is director of the Berthiaume Institute for Precision Health. An internationally recognized expert in supramolecular engineering, Webber also serves as a concurrent associate professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry. His research focuses on applying supramolecular principles, leveraging defined and rationally designed non-covalent interactions, to prepare biomaterials and drug delivery technologies. Webber received a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University under the direction of Prof. Samuel Stupp. Subsequently, he was an NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellow at MIT in the labs of Profs. Robert Langer and Daniel Anderson.