I completed my Ph.D. in Cole DeForest's Lab at the University of Washington. There I conduct research to develop novel biomaterials for use in vascular, renal, and cardiac tissue engineering. In particular, our group is interested in the use of click-chemistry based hydrogels and photochemistry to control cell function and biology. So called 4D control allots researchers the capacity to study biology in a site specific manner controlling their local microenvironment in both space and time.

At the University of Washington, I have been trained as a practicing medical clinician for three years. We, at the UW focus on the importance of patient care and patient advocacy. I have been trained in physiology, pathology, infectious disease, and clinical medicine. During my time as a medical student I was involved in two projects culminating in two publications in peer-reviewed journals.

Awarded a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science/NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship, I worked with Dr. Mitsuhiro Ebara and Koichiro Uto on the development of smart shape memory materials for biomedical applications. By developing and applying novel thermo-responsive and pH-responsive PCL-based polymers, I created cell culture platforms to study the effects of dynamic nanoarchitecture on stem cell function and drug-cell interactions.

Loss of cartilage due to trauma, surgery, and degenerative disorders like osteoarthritis pose a significant health risk as they impair a patient’s quality of life and mobility. Although a number of different types of surgical treatments are employed, all exhibit significant limitations on their ability to regenerate cartilage. While cell-based therapies exhibit promise as an alternative to surgery, their clinical applicability is hindered by the inability to control the fate of implanted chondrocytes as they can exhibit either hypertrophic differentiation or dedifferentiation into fibrocartilage. For these reasons, there has been an increased interest in the tissue engineering community to incorporate the use of growth factors to facilitate cartilage repair and control the release of such proteins to optimize their therapeutic potential and minimize loss due to degradation.In particular, photopolymerizable hydrogels derived from natural polymers have attracted significant interest in tissue engineering, due to their mechanical and chemical similarities to extracellular matricies and their ability to be cured in situ. While many such hydrogels are biocompatible, advancements in tissue engineering require that these hydrogels also enhance adhesion, spreading, proliferation and differentiation of implanted cells. I proposed the development of an injectable composite photopolimerizable chitosan scaffold. Our photopolimerizable chitosan is prepared via graft methacrylation of glycol chitosan. Photoinitiation is employed using the photoinitor riboflavin and visible blue light. Preliminary results indicate that our cured methacrylated glycol chitosan (MeGCS) hydrogels maintain 90% cell viability and are mechanically stable, but exhibit limited cell proliferation and chondrogenic effects. To enhance spreading, adhesion, and differentiation, my composite hydrogels incorporate encapsulated Col-1 or conjugated RGD-peptides.

As an undergraduate, I tested the effects of biomimetic apatite on human adipose derived stem cells (hASCs) and mouse MC3T3-E1 preosteoblasts and sought to develop a novel calcium phosphate based transfection technique utilizing biomimetic apatite nanoparticles. I co-authored a publication in the Annals of Biomedical Engineering. In that article, we proved the existence and importance of a thin protein coating over the apatite surface for both cell viability and proliferation on apatite substrates.Simultaneously, our group began to investigate the use of apatite nanoparticles for transfection and delivery of small molecules. Apatite particles, created using the same process as apatite substrates, were loaded with si-RNA tagged with a fluorescent probe. Apatite nanoparticles loaded with fluorescent tagged siRNA exhibit greater uptake compared to lipofectamine-based transfection techniques.