James and Meysam were recognized in the news for creating the world's smallest longhorn and for their recent publication on DNA origami assembly thermodynamics. Way to go!!

Read about it here: UT News | KXAN | phys.org

Alex was awarded the 2026 Dean's Award for Outstanding Engineering Teaching by an Assistant Professor

Keira & Emily go to MAX IV Laboratory and Lund University to collaborate with the Nilsson group to utilize AF4-SAXS to uncover size-dependent structural-property relationships

Alex, Emily, Aasim, & Khaled (left to right) had a great time at the APS meeting in Denver!

Alex and Allie Obermeyer (Columbia U) organized the 2026 DPOLY Short Course on "Polymers in Biotechnology"

Our paper on the thermodynamics and impact of cooperativity in DNA origami assembly is now online in Small! Great job Meysam and team!!! We celebrated the paper in a lab lunch!

Alex was named a Walker Scholar by the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering! Congratulations to all lab members who have contributed to this achievement!

Alex co-organized a 3-day symposium at the national ACS meeting titled "Nanoscale tools to understand the physical biology of the cell"

Dianna and Brandon join us through the CREATE and MRSEC REU programs for the summer! Dianna is a student at Austin Community College and Brandon is a student at Texas State University. 

Successful trip to FNANO 2025! 

Emily received Honorable Mention for the NSF GRFP! Way to go!

Congratulations to Amrita on the Undergraduate Research Fellowship!!

Alex was awarded an Outstanding Teaching Award by the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Congratulations to Nour on winning the Undergraduate Research Fellowship! A well deserved honor.

We won 3rd place (and the Piston Cup) in the department Halloween costume contest! 

News of our recent NIH R35 award was featured through the ME department and the Texas Materials Institute

We welcome Taru Mishra and Olivia Galaviz as summer researchers!

Congratulations to Christian for finishing his Master's degree! Cheers to another semester in the books. 

Aasim & James received honorable mention at the 2024 Graduate Student Poster Competition in the Mechanical Engineering Department!

Our collaborative work with UT Pharmacy is now published in Pharmaceutical Research. We use electron density mapping to show RNA distribution in LNPs! Read it here.

Our collaborative work with a team from UT ChE and MD Anderson is now published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Congrats Mohammed and Aasim! Read it here.

Lab Holiday party!

Congratulations Ogo for winning 3rd place in the Graduate Rapid Fire Presentations Competition at the annual SWE conference! 

Congrats to Aasim for passing his qualifying exams and becoming a BME PhD Candidate!!

The Marras Research Group would like to welcome our new PhD students, Ogo and Meysam!

Alex gave a keynote lecture at the 11th Annual Texas Soft Matter meeting at the University of Houston.

Congratulations to Morgan for winning 1st place 🥇 in the REU poster competition!

Aasim travels to UC Santa Barbara for the BioPacific Summer School.

Some of Alex's postdoc work appears in Macromolecules - pdf

The team took a trip out to Topgolf and enjoyed the warm weather!

We are excited to have added a new member to our team, Morgan Nix! She is an REU student with us for the summer from LeTourneau University!

We explored the Austin Greek Festival this weekend! Great food and Greek dancing!

Our lab ventured out (a couple of feet) to an on-campus Spurs vs Trailblazers game at the Moody Center! 

Alex gave a seminar for the Biomedical Engineering Department at UT Austin.

The Marras Research Group goes to Argonne National Lab where we had a successful trip working at the beamline. 

Alex gave a seminar for the Biophysics Group at UT Austin.

Alex opened the New Faculty Lightning Talk series at UT Austin hosted at the Texas Innovation Center.

The Marras Research Group welcomes our third graduate student, Aasim Hussain as a PhD student within the lab. 

Alex's review titled "Hierarchical Assembly of DNA Origami Nanostructures" is published in MRS Communications as part of the Early Career Materials Researcher special issue. See it here!

Alex gave a seminar for the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics at UT Austin

The Marras Research Group begins at University of Texas at Austin. Go Longhorns! 🤘 We welcome James Houston and Christian Keys as Master's students within the lab. You will find them both scouring the grounds of the 7th floor ETC.