Event

CANCELED - BIOE Seminar: Dr. Kristi Anseth

Friday, April 24, 2020
9:00 a.m.-10:00 a.m.
A. James Clark Hall, Room 2132
Emily Rosenthal
301 405 3936
erosent1@umd.edu

Dr. Kristi Anseth

Distinguished Professor, Chemical and Biological Engineering

Associate Professor of Surgery

University of Colorado Boulder

Dynamic Hydrogel Matrices: Cell Biology in the Fourth Dimension

Methods for culturing mammalian cells in a biologically relevant context are increasingly needed to study cell and tissue physiology, expand and differentiate progenitor cells, and to grow replacement tissues for regenerative medicine.  Two-dimensional culture has been the paradigm for in vitro cell culture; however, evidence and intuition suggest that cells behave differently when they are isolated from the complex architecture of their native tissues and constrained to petri dishes or material surfaces with unnaturally high stiffness, polarity, and surface to volume ratio.  As a result, biologists are often faced with the need for a more physiologically relevant 3D culture environment, and many researchers are realizing the advantages of hydrogels as a means of creating custom 3D microenvironments with highly controlled chemical, biological and physical cues.  Further, the native ECM is far from static, so ECM mimics must also be dynamic to direct complex cellular behavior, the so called fourth-dimension.  In general, there is an un-met need for materials that allow user-defined control over the spatio-temporal presentation of important signals, such as integrin-binding ligands, growth factor release, and biomechanical signals.  Developing such hydrogel mimics of the ECM for 4D cell culture is an archetypal engineering problem, requiring control of numerous properties on multiple time and length scales important for cellular functions.  New materials systems have the potential to significantly improve our understanding of how cells receive information from their microenvironment and the role that these dynamic processes may play in controlling the stem cell niche to cancer metastasis.  This talk will illustrate our recent efforts to advance hydrogel chemistries for 4D cell culture and regenerative biology, and how we dynamically control biochemical and biophysical properties through orthogonal, photochemical click reaction mechanisms.

About the Speaker

Kristi S. Anseth is the Tisone Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Head of Academic Leadership of the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA.  Her research interests lie at the interface between biology and engineering where she designs new biomaterials for applications in drug delivery and regenerative medicine.  Dr. Anseth is an elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, and most recently the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences.  She is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, Society for Biomaterials, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and Materials Research Society.  Dr. Anseth currently serves on the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Board of Trustees for the Gordon Research Conferences, on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Allen Institute.   She is also an editor for Biomacromolecules and Progress in Materials Science.