-: Welcome back, Sports Nightly here
in the Husker Sport Center, and we are thrilled
to be joined by a couple of very special
guests in our studio here today.
We're gonna start with University of Nebraska
Lincoln chancellor Ronnie Green.
Here we are, school year's underway.
I know you get really excited for the first week of school.
-: Well, you know, when you have 56 hundred new
freshmen coming back and rolling into town,
you know, a couple weeks ago we started
to hear the drum beat. You can start hearing
the drum beat on campus, it puts your pulse in place, right?
So it's exciting to have classes underway again at Nebraska,
we've got another record year coming at us,
that we're excited about.
Campus is buzzing with energy with all those students,
and the breadth of our faculty back, you know.
When we think about the breadth of where our students
come from, and the talent that is in our student body,
combined with the talent that is in
our world-class faculty, across the board
and across all of our academic colleges.
This is just a really special place to be,
at this university, and of course, you know,
we've got this little thing called athletics
kicking into gear with the red white scrimmage
we just finished up in volleyball,
and we've got volleyball team kicking off, literally,
serving off I guess I should say,
on Friday, with their first game.
And football coming up here just in a few days.
-: Gonna be fun, gonna be a great time.
This is the time of year, chancellor,
where we hear a lot of, oh, this volleyball player's
a preseason All-American, or this
football player's a preseason American,
we hear all about that. But today,
you brought with you a special guest,
a member of your faculty,
who recently received a pretty impressive national award.
I'm gonna let you introduce our guest.
-: Well, you know Greg, like I said a minute ago,
we have 22 hundred, over 22 hundred world-leading
faculty on our land grant University campus,
across a comprehensive range of fields,
and recently, one of our, what I'll call still young
faculty received a really prestigious honor.
Dr Angie Pannier, who is a professor of
biological systems engineering in our engineering college,
and in the institute of Ag and Natural Resources.
First thing I want you to always know about Angie
is that she's a Nebraskan, and she's a Husker,
through and through, native of Fremont,
she has a tremendous career that she already has had
and I can't even imagine what the rest of her career
is going to look like in her field.
She's a real pioneer in her field,
as you're gonna get a chance to hear
from her about today.
And this summer, she was highlighted
with a very prestigious award,
she was among 300 young researchers from across the US
who were recognized by president Trump,
with a Presidential Early Career Award
for Scientists and Engineers.
It's the highest honor given by the US Government
for early career scientists, and the first
Nebraskan to receive this award.
This is not the first, one of the first that
Dr Pannier has had, in this year
she had another first award with NIH,
National Institutes of Health, this year as well.
So I'm just delighted and very proud
of Angie and her accomplishments.
I'm really glad she could be with us on the program today.
-: Absolutely, Dr Pannier it's great to have you with us.
Congratulations on your Early Career Award
for Scientists and Engineering.
I know that you hope that this research
is going to help treat some diseases,
and change people's lives, tell us about this.
-: Sure, thank you, it's great to be here.
Our research really focuses on trying to engineer
adult stem cells for therapies, and so
there's, you know, a lot of excitement
in the field of cell therapy and medicine
that adult tissues, like bone marrow and fat,
have these stem cells that have properties
that are proposed to be able to be used as therapies.
However, those cells need a little bit of coaxing,
a little bit of help to do that function, and so
we're really focused on how to transfer
genetic information, or DNA, into those cells
in an effective and safe way, so that we can sort of
engineer those stem cells to go
to where they need to in the body for healing.
So they've been proposed as a way to heal
after heart attacks, or to treat cancer,
or Alzheimer's, or whatever, grow replacement cartilage
for knees and hips, and so these cells have this potential
but we really are working to try to engineer those cells
to specifically heal some of those diseases or tissues,
and so we're really focused on the mechanisms
to transfer DNA into these cells.
-: How did you get started doing this,
what spurred this for you?
-: Well, I mean, science and engineering I was
always in high school interested in math, science
and physics, but I didn't know
what I wanted to do with that, and I had a really
outstanding physics teacher who started talking
to me about engineering, how you could use
your love of math, science and physics and solve problems
that are relevant to people, and a lot of people
were pushing me into the medical field,
and I said, you know, I'd like
to help people but maybe from afar.
Maybe I don't want to touch the sick people
but maybe my technologies could help them,
and so I really got interested at that point
in biomedical engineering, and then, you know,
throughout undergrad and graduate school
I just had some really great faculty members
here at Nebraska and then in graduate school.
That helped kinda set me on this path towards DNA transfer.
Also DNA transfer is very challenging and hard
and I like a good challenge, so.
-: The chancellor mentioned you're from Fremont,
so you're back at your alma mater.
You could do this anywhere.
-: Yeah.
-: Why here?
-: You know, the University of Nebraska Lincoln
changed my life, I came from a smaller town
and I would've never imagined this was my life,
or that I would be doing this research,
or going to DC, to the White House to receive an award.
Nothing that you ever really set out
or imagine for yourself, but I just felt that
Nebraska had such a great, not only are the curriculum
and the opportunities great, but the faculty
are world-class and yet are totally dedicated
to eduction, and so that's felt at a student level,
I think it's felt at a faculty level,
it's felt at the administrator level,
and so as a student here, I just couldn't believe
the opportunities that were opening up in my life
'cause I was a student here.
And so then when given the chance to come back
as a faculty member, I just jumped at it,
I couldn't believe that I could be a faculty member
at an institution that gave me everything.
Which was also kind of big shoes to fill,
I was a little overwhelmed when I came back.
I wanted to be as good as all
the faculty members that I had.
It's just been a fantastic place to start my career
and to really build it.
-: And chancellor, this is, I mean,
having faculty members like Angie,
that's what makes this a special place, isn't it?
Chancellor: Well, it sure does,
and Angie's pretty humble, you know,
she's a world-class teacher, an educator,
both for undergraduates and for graduate students.
She's a world-class researcher, part of that mission
that we have as a land grant university.
I could point to hundreds of faculty around our campus
who are mentoring and developing the next generation
in that way, but it's just a super honor for Angie.
She, in her spare time, you know, she's also been
one of the four faculty co-leaders
across the university campus this year
that's helping to firm up and develop our five-year
road map for the university campus.
So, just very, very proud of Angie and all of our faculty
across the University of Nebraska.
-: Fantastic. Dr Pannier, again, congratulations,
thank you for coming and sharing your story with us.
-: Absolutely, thank you.
-: Chancellor, great to see you, we'll see you
on Saturday for kickoff.
-: Absolutely, go Big Red.
-: Ronnie Green with us here on Sports Nightly
we're back with more next.