Translational Microfluidics Laboratory

Congratulations to graduate student Ryan Stack for being awarded an inaugural Lampe Pilot Research grant for his proposal entitled, "An ALI skin-on-chip to model wound healing by tuning collagen III:I ratio." The grant will support his research efforts and training toward an independent research career.

Congratulations to Chloe Whitworth for defending her thesis entitled, "Uncovering novel roles for P300 and Notch1 as mechanotransducers in the vascular endothelium." She was awarded a PhD from the Genetics and Molecular Biology Department in the UNC School of Medicine. The work is highly multidisciplinary but all the more impressive as it was done in an engineering laboratory. We will miss her when she goes on to bigger and better things!

Harry's 2023 paper entitled, "A facile fluid pressure system reveals differential cellular response to interstitial pressure gradients and flow" was recently selected as a best paper in the journal. The paper can be found here, and a description of the award is here. This work was highly collaborative with contributions from engineers and biologists from the lab and describes a very clever system that Harry designed to provide high precision for physiologic pressure regulati

Great work by the Kutys lab was just published in the Life Science Alliance. Tanya, a recently minted PhD from the Kutys lab, investigates the mechanisms by which Notch1 polarizes and responds to fluid shear stress. More can be found here: https://www.life-science-alliance.org/content/9/4/e202503599

Bill was awarded the BME departmental research award for recent research accomplishments. This is really more of a reflection on the work of the lab than him... so congrats to the team for well-deserved recognition of your hard work!

The Polacheck Lab and Carter Cao's lab at the Eshleman School of Pharmacy were awarded a gran through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) through the Computational ADME-Tox and Physiology Analysis for Safer Therapeutics (CATALYST) program. The grant will fund the Polacheck Lab to develop high-throughput, patient-specific, immune-competent organ-on-chip models that will inform the development of more accurate pharmokinetic models and toxicity predictions,