Dr. Parekkadan received two NIH R01 awards. The first is a 4-year Focused Technology Development Award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIH/NIGMS) for a project entitled: "A Functional genomics platform with integrated library cloning and molecular display". This new proposal, in collaboration with Dr. Ben Larman at Johns Hopkins University, seeks to develop technologies for high-throughput construction and functional expression screening of complex protein libraries from human genomes as a resource for the national biomedical research enterprise. The second is a 4-year renewal of his Bioengineering Research Partnership Award (R01) from the National Institute of Bioengineering and BioImaging (NIH/NIBIB) for a project entitled: "Artificial, Humanized Stem Cell Niches" This goal of this renewal is to create disease-mimicking bone marrow environments for the study of bone marrow cancer stem cells and is in collaboration with hematologists at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey to strengthen ties between biomedical engineering and medicine at Rutgers.