PhD candidate Lena Landaverde awarded SLAS Graduate Education Fellowship Grant
The Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) has announced BU’s Lena Landaverde, MS, PhD candidate as recipient of the 2026 SLAS Graduate Education Fellowship Grant. The $100,000 fellowship will support her innovative work combining 3D in vitro cell modeling and robotic automation to advance women’s health research. Her research focuses on uterine fibroids, the most common benign tumors in the uterus, and how environmental factors may influence their growth and behavior. Using lab-grown organoid models and scalable high-throughput approaches, Landaverde studies cellular responses, extracellular matrix dynamics and inflammation markers—methods that could provide new insights into disease mechanisms and potential interventions.
“This fellowship unlocks the opportunity to advance women’s health through the intersection of LLM-driven robotic automation and in vitro cellular models. It’s proof that propelling multidisciplinary research can lead to innovative solutions.”
– Lena Landaverde
SLAS is an international professional society of academic, industry and government researchers, and a leader in the pursuit of research excellence. The goal of the SLAS Fellowship Grant Program is to facilitate educational opportunities for outstanding students pursuing graduate degrees related to quantitative biosciences and/or life sciences R&D. This program helps to realize a fundamental tenet of SLAS’s mission: to advance the fields of laboratory science and technology by nurturing the next generation of professional scientists.
Judging criteria for the SLAS Graduate Education Fellowship Grant is based on the applicability of the applicant’s research to laboratory automation and screening, originality and creativity of the scientific approach, quality of the science, presentation of the research objectives and the quality and capability of the institution and its educational program to support the grant.