Hometown: Columbus, Ohio

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Education: BS in Chemical Engineering, University of Dayton, 2020

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Research interests: My research focuses on developing a cardiac patch that mimics the native structure, organization, and vascularization of healthy heart tissue to repair damage following injury. More specifically, my graduate research aims to engineer a cardiac patch that could be implanted onto the heart to repair the irreversible damage that follows a serious injury, such as a myocardial infarction. My approach is three-fold: (1) incorporate the fundamental cellular and acellular components of the heart (2) with sufficient capillary-scale vascularization (3) that mimics native cardiac tissue organization. To do this, I differentiate stem cells into two cardiac cell types (cardiomyocytes and cardiac fibroblasts), develop synthetic ECM-like cell-adhesive fibers, and encapsulate all components in a natural hydrogel to create a cardiac patch. I use a custom microfluidic device to align the tissue into microbundles, mimicking the native architecture of the myocardium and encouraging anisotropic cardiomyocyte and myofibril alignment. I have also engineered a system to incorporate aligned capillaries in 3D tissue constructs to mimic the native organization of vasculature in the heart. Overall, I have found that (1) incorporating cell-adhesive fibers significantly improves cardiomyocyte spreading, myofibril formation, and beating synchronicity of the tissue, (2) inclusion of cardiac fibroblasts improves tissue compaction, and (3) capillary-scale vascularized tissue improves 3D cardiac patch viability.

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Outside of lab interests: Outside of work, I enjoy hiking, camping, and backpacking. I also love to cook, travel, and play volleyball.