U of L Student's Groundbreaking Vaccine Purity Study Featured in Top Journal

Jan 20, 2026 | 3:45 PM The University of Lethbridge (U of L) is celebrating a big accomplishment for one of its undergraduate students. A study into vaccine development, led by Sophia Bird, has been published in Advanced Functional Materials, a leading journal in the field. Pharmaceutical companies use a process called analytical ultracentrifugation (AUC) to assess the purity of vaccine formulations during development. Bird and her research team developed a new technique to measure the purity. She says, “The method and software we created to analyze the data are really novel because they can identify contaminants that other methods were unable to detect. This ultimately helps pharmaceutical companies and researchers create pure vaccine products.” The U of L says purity is critical in vaccine development because contaminants can reduce effectiveness or trigger unwanted immune responses. Bird is a fourth-year biochemistry student. She says, especially as an undergrad student, it was an incredible opportunity to become a first author in such a prestigious journal. “Being a first author means that I had a significant role in designing the experiment, writing the paper and collecting and analyzing the results. I had the opportunity to collaborate with a lot of great people who helped me understand the system, improve my research and interpret the results,” says Bird. The study has helped her to secure a six-month internship with Roche, a healthcare biotech company, at their facility in Penzberg, Germany. She will get to work in Roche’s gene therapy department. She will not only learn from those in the company, but will teach them some of the AUC techniques she used at the U of L.