News

Undergrad Amanda Panepento (working with postdoc William Wan) was awarded both BURST and HHMI-UROP summer grants for her project on "Development of patterned photodegradable hydrogel platforms for cardiomyocyte culture. Congratulations Amanda!

Ian Marozas earns the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship issued by the National Academies, all three of which count Kristi as a member. This prestigous fellowship provides a stipend, tuition, fees, and expenses paid to attend Ford Fellows Conferences for three years. Congratulations Ian!

Ian Marozas earned the prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which will fund his research for three years. This is a very competitive fellowship and a great award. Congratulations Ian!

Daniel McKinnon and Dylan Domaille (postdoc in Jen Cha's lab) "Bis-Aliphatic Hydrazone-Linked Hydrogels Form Most Rapidly at Physiological pH: Identifying the Origin of Hydrogel Properties with Small Molecule Kinetic Studies" in Chemistry of Materials. They show they are able to control mechanical material properties through adjusting buffer pH and show...

C&EN publishes fantastic piece on Chun Yang's recent paper. Check it out at http://cen.acs.org/articles/92/web/2014/03/Stem-Cells-Possess-Mechanical-Memory.html

William Wan and Jen Leight win BioFrontiers Science Alliance Seed Grant for their proposed project on “Non-invasive monitoring of MMP activity of cardiac fibroblasts cultured under diseased and fibrotic microenvironments.” Congratulations to you both.

The Scientist magazine wrote an fantastic highlight of Chun Yang's recent Nature Materials paper. It can found at http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/39439/title/Stem-Cells-Remember-Substrates/ .

Chun Yang publishes "Mechanical memory and dosing influence stem cell fate" in Nature Materials. She shows that hMSCs differentiate differently when exposed to surfaces of different moduli for different periods of time. Congratulations Chun! http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nmat3889.html

After the dust settled and all the votes were counted, Kelly Mabry and Tobin Brown were left in a dead heat for Spring Employee of the Quarter, so have the honor of being our first joint awardees. Kelly and Tobin have both been very active in ensuring the lab runs...

Katie Lewis and Daniel McKinnon win STAR Awards for outstanding abstracts submitted to the Society for Biomaterials 2014 Spring Meeting in Denver. Come by and see their talks if you make it to the meeting!