Category: Meet the PI

Congratulations to Dr. Blanka Sharma for receiving the 2025 BME Faculty Service Excellence Award! On December 5th, Dr. Blanka Sharma was awarded the 2025 BME Faculty Service Excellence Award. This award is given to the BME primary faculty member who provided outstanding and dedicated service to the department. Dr. Sharma was selected for her work […]

On May 26th, Dr. Sharma traveled across the world to Daegu, South Korea to share our latest research findings in osteoarthritis. The World Biomaterials Congress is a world-wide event where the participating experts can gather and share the latest information and knowledge in the diverse areas of biomaterials research. The venue for the event, Daegu, […]

Congratulations to Dr. Sharma and collaborators for receiving an NIH National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases grant for her project titled “ROS scavenging nanoparticles for mitigating oxidative stress in osteoarthritis”. The team of investigators includes Dr. Kyle Allen (BME), Dr. Terrence Ryan (Applied Physiology and Kinesiology), and Dr. Hari Parvataneni (Orthopedic Surgery). […]

Dr. Sharma is a recipient of the 2022 Shared Resource Pilot and Exploratory Study Award The University of Florida Health Cancer Center has selected Dr. Blanka Sharma as one of three researchers to receive 2022 Shared Resource Pilot and Exploratory Study Awards. These projects are designed to collect preliminary data required to test novel ideas […]

After spending the last year completing the tenure process, Dr. Sharma officially received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in June 2020. The long tenure process requires a recommendation by the department, review by the Board of Trustees, and approval from the Dean. Congratulations to Dr. Sharma for reaching this milestone! The Sharma lab will […]

In May 2020, Dr. Sharma was named as the recipient of the Pramod Khargonekar Junior Faculty Award of Excellence! The award is given by the College Tenure and Promotion Committee and recognizes a tenure candidate who best reflects leadership attributes exhibited by the former UF Dean of the College of Engineering, Dr. Khargonekar. For more […]

In January 2020, Dr. Sharma was recognized in the University of Florida Health Cancer Center Connection Member Newsletter. She spoke on the cross-section of cancer and osteoarthritis research currently being done in the Sharma Lab. You can check out her interview with the newsletter here: https://connection.cancer.ufl.edu/2019/12/02/member-highlight-dec-jan-19-20/

Dr. Sharma was recently named a recipient of the NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award, one of the NSF’s most prestigious awards for junior faculty. According to Dawn Tilbury, the head of the NSF’s Engineering directorate, “With NSF CAREER awards, junior STEM faculty have the opportunity to tackle important and unique research challenges and […]

Dr. Blanka Sharma and her collaborators Dr. Kyle Allen, BME associate professor, and Dr. Wendy Liu, associate professor of biomedical engineering at UC Irvine, were recently awarded an R01 research grant from the National Institutes of Health. This grant seeks to investigate a multi-modal approach to osteoarthritis therapies. Osteoarthritis, a complex disease that involves the destruction of […]

Congratulations to Dr. Sharma for being selected as the 2016 Outstanding Faculty Member by the UF Graduate Student Council! This award is presented to a full-time faculty member who has excelled at mentoring students, especially in scholarly research, at the undergraduate and graduate levels.   Read the story here.