Congratulations to Samantha Zambuto who was awarded the 2019 BMES Career Development Award for her work regarding racial disparities in pregnancy and how stress affects trophoblast invasion. The prestigious award aims to “support travel to the BMES Annual Meeting for Graduate Students, Postdoctoral Fellows, and Early Career Professionals from underrepresented populations in biomedical engineering and/or involved in research and training focused on health disparities and minority health”.

A large chunk of the Harley Lab members will be attending the Society for Biomaterials 2019 Annual Meeting in Seattle, WA from April 3rd to April 6th. If you are also attending, be sure to stop by any and all of the Harley Lab posters and presentations. You’ll be dazzled and amazed:

Wednesday
Marley Dewey: The Addition of the Amniotic Membrane to Mineralized Collagen Scaffolds for Immunomodulatory Bone Regeneration. (5 min rapid fire) at 4pm on Wednesday, also poster #125

Thursday
Raul Sun Han: Biomimetic Triphasic Scaffolds for Osteotendinous Junction Regeneration, 11:45am
Aidan Gilchrist: Exploiting biomaterial-modulated secretome production in artificial stem cell niches. 2:30pm
Samantha Zumbuto: Development of a Biomaterial Model of the Decidualized Endometrium. 6pm

Posters:
Marley Dewey: The Addition of the Amniotic Membrane to Mineralized Collagen Scaffolds for Immunomodulatory Bone Regeneration, poster #125
Julio Serrano: Gelatin-based Thiol/Disulfide Degradable Hydrogels to Encapsulate Cells, poster #775
CJ Hunter: Developing a Spatially-Defined Biomaterial Model of the Glioblastoma Perivascular Niche, poster #791
Emily Chen: Patient Derived Glioblastoma Cells Activate Microglia in a Three-Dimensional Gelatin Hydrogel, poster #816

Emily Chen was selected to participate in the 2019 St. Jude National Graduate Student Symposium (NGSS). Emily is one of 38 students selected from over 1400 by a faculty review committee for the 2019 symposium.

“St. Jude offers two annual invited events for select PhD students from around the U.S.: the National Graduate Student Symposium (NGSS), held in spring, and the Future Fellow Research Conference (FFRC), held in summer. Both events are all-expenses-paid and are hosted on the St. Jude campus in Memphis, Tennessee. These competitive symposia allow PhD-level graduate students from U.S. institutions to present their work, meet our faculty and learn about the cutting-edge research and facilities at St. Jude.”

We are super happy and super excited to announce that Aidan Gilchrist was recently awarded a Fellowship Research Award (F31) by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) for his proposal “Dynamics of autocrine and paracrine signaling domains in HSC maintenance”.

The ever charismatic chemist, Dr. Julio Serrano, recently received 2-years of funding through a NIH R01 postdoctoral supplement! His labmates are pumped to know they have 2 years to soak up his chemical knowledge.

Dr. Harley is the PI of a new R21 research award from the National Institutes of Health entitled, ‘Amniotic membrane derived matrix for large bone defect repair.’ Working with Co-PI Matt Wheeler (Illinois) and Collaborator Kara Spiller (Drexel) we will explore new biomaterial designs to modulate the immune response immediately after injury as a means to accelerate craniofacial bone regeneration!

Tori Barnhouse and Samantha Zambuto both passed their qualifying exams! Now they can put that stress behind them and focus on the vastly more stressful research! yay!

The amazing imaging and scientific work of Emily Chen and Tori Barnhouse was highlighted by the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. Check it out the cancer spheroid and see if you can spy anything particularly cancer awareness-ey about it: August Image of the Month

Aidan was pleasantly surprised to win an Outstanding Poster Award at the GRC Signal Transduction by Engineered Extracellular Matrices. Sarah Heilshorn gave the certificate and was gracious enough to not make fun of Aidan’s unpleasantly wrinkled T-shirt.

Mai Ngo was selected as a 2018 SCS Teaching Award to recognize her teaching excellence in the 2017-2018 year. Way to go Mai!