Welcome!

The Hind research group is broadly interested in using engineered devices to study the innate immune response to infection. The innate immune response is a complicated process that involves numerous cell types and occurs in many different tissues throughout the body. In order to better understand both the chemical and biophysical mechanisms that drive the human immune response, we must study cellular behavior in physiologically relevant contexts. Our group designs microfluidic models inspired by in vivo biology that recapitulate many of the important cell-cell interactions and structural components of the infectious microenvironment. We then use these models to study how multicellular interactions and the physical environment influence innate immune cell function during infection. This multidisciplinary research is carried out using principles and techniques from engineering, immunology, molecular biology, and microscopy.