CBE Seminar Series

The CBE Seminar Series is organized to host experts from both academia and industry to present their research and share their expertise in biofilm research and innovation. Each semester, a committee of CBE graduate students and staff invite and host the colleagues and visitors (on and off-campus) who present at this seminar series.

The CBE 2025-2026 seminar organizing committee

Kristen Connolly, Technical Operations Manager
Kristen Griffin, Communications & Marketing
Jake Marquis, PhD student, Microbiology & Cell Biology
Ghazal Vahidi, Postdoctoral Researcher, CBE
Ethan Viles, PhD student, Mechanical & Industrial Engineering
Kathryn Zimlich, PhD student, Microbiology & Cell Biology

If you have feedback or a speaker suggestion for the CBE Seminar Series, please contact a member of the organizing committee.

Fall 2025 Schedule

Thursdays
NEW TIME: 1:45 p.m.–2:55 p.m. Mountain Time (MT) *unless otherwise noted below
Location: Barnard 126

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Presentation Title
08/28	No seminar
09/04	Dr. Monica Serban	Professor, Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Montana; Director, Montana Biotechnology Center	Connecting research and product development: Practical translational approaches
09/11	Dr. Felix Weinhardt	Visiting Researcher, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig, Germany	Integrating microfluidic experiments and numerical simulations to study biogeochemical processes in porous media
09/18	No seminar
09/25	No seminar
10/02 Co-Host: Montana Nanotechnology Facility (MONT)	Dr. Stephen Boppart	Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)	Optical coherence tomography and multimodal optical characterization of bacterial biofilms in humans and their implications for disease
10/09	Dr. Rob Brzozowski	BioSqueeze, Inc.	Commercial biomineralization: From laboratory to field applications
10/16* 9:00 a.m. MST Virtual	Dr. Joaquin Jimenez-Martinez	Research Scientist-Group Leader at Eawag (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology); Adjunct Professor, Dept. of Civil, Environmental, and Geomatic Engineering, ETH Zurich	Microbial dynamics in subsurface environments: Bacterial chemotaxis and morphogenesis of biofilms Contact CBE for virtual access to this seminar
10/22* 2:00 p.m. NAH 165 Co-Hosts: Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering and the Materials Science Graduate Program at Montana State University	Dr. Rainer Helmig	Professor, Dept. of Hydromechanics and Modelling of Hydrosystems, University of Stuttgart 2025 InterPore Foundation/ Kimberly-Clark Distinguished Lectureship Award Recipient	From the brain to water uptake of roots to fuel cells—Porous media are “almost” everywhere
10/30	Dr. Chris Jones	PI, Standardized Biofilm Methods Laboratory, Center for Biofilm Engineering	Dry biofilms contribute to bacterial persistence on environmental surfaces
11/06	Dr. Patrick Thomas	Postdoctoral Researcher, Center for Biofilm Engineering	TBA
11/13	Dr. Darla Goeres	Coordinator of Industrial Development, Center for Biofilm Engineering	Bridging research and industry: The opportunities of CBE's Industry Membership Program
11/20	Dr. Brittan Scales	Postdoctoral Researcher, Center for Biofilm Engineering	TBA
11/27	No Seminar - Fall Break
12/04	TBA