Welcome K’Ashé, our new STCSI student!

We’d like to welcome K’Ashé  McKinney to the lab!  K’Ashé  comes to us as part of the Summer Translational Cardiovascular Science Institute (https://www.bme.psu.edu/STCSI/) .  She is from the Bahamas and is a Penn State Biomedical Engineering undergraduate student.  She will be developing flexible nanoparticles for applications to cardiovascular disease and cancer.  Welcome K’Ashé!

Congratulations “CREATE” students!

Students from the “CREATE Program” in BME successfully completed a summer of research in the Mechanobiology Lab.  Tayo and Brianna led research efforts that involved microfluidics, computational fluid dynamics, fluorescence imaging, and cell culture.  Thanks also to the expert computational skills of Rebekah who worked her COMSOL magic this summer.

Welcome “CREATE” students

We welcome some new people to the lab this summer.  Brianna Rodriguez,  an undergrad from Rowan University in NJ, and Adetayo Adeboyejo (Tayo), a Biology and Food Science teacher at Manor New Technology High School in Austin TX, come to us as part of the CREATE program in BME at Penn State (http://bme.psu.edu/create/index.aspx).   Rebekah Moshier, an undergrad from Penn State BME department will also join us.  Welcome team!  Looking forward to a great summer!

Sam Boland Defends Honors Thesis

Sam Boland, a senior in Biomedical Engineering,  has been working on developing computational models that predict how nanoparticles interact with endothelial cells near atherosclerotic regions of blood vessels. We are pleased that he successfully defended his thesis on this topic.  These models will help us know whether the same fluid flow patterns in blood vessels that are responsible for atherosclerosis might be used to cure it.  Excellent work, Sam!

Seoyoung Son Successfully Defends her Doctoral Dissertation!

On 2/28/18,  Seoyoung defended her thesis entitled:  “The Role of the Membrane in Integrin-Mediated Adhesion of Cells to Surfaces.”  This work highlighted how lipids can influence mechanical interaction of cells with their surroundings much like they influence chemical  interactions. Seoyoung also developed a new method to measure, for the first time, mechanical properties of cell membranes in their native state.  Nice work Seoyoung!

New Nature Chemistry article by collaborators describes organization of signaling complexes that may operate in cells

Xi Zhao led a team of researchers from multiple universities to uncover how impulsive enzymes can migrate up substrate concentration gradients and coalesce into signaling complexes.  The article, entitled, “Substrate-driven chemotactic assembly in an enzyme cascade,”  appears in Nature Chemistry:  https://www.nature.com/articles/nchem.2905 .  Congratulations Xi!

The Lab Heads to Phoenix for the BMES fall meeting

Seoyoung Son and Pouria Fattahi will present their work at the 2017 BMES fall meeting in Phoenix from 10/11 – 10/14.

Here are some links to their presentations:

Biomechanics
Poster
Thursday, October 12, 2017
9:30 AM – 5:00 PM Exhibit Hall 300 North

Drug Delivery for Tissue Engineering

Tissue Engineering
Drug Delivery & Intelligent Systems
Oral
Friday, October 13, 2017
3:30 PM – 5:00 PM Room 221C

4:15 PM – 4:30 PM The Role of Cellular Morphology in Nanoparticle Uptake   P. FATTAHI, Y. Yeh, S. Zheng, S. Zhang, J. Brown, P. Butler.