Translational Microfluidics Laboratory

Welcome to Dr. Kristin Kim from Dr. Chris Lemmon's lab at VCU! We are very excited to have Kristin join to take on efforts involving scale-up and reproducibility for fabricating organs-on-chip. Dr. Kim's deep knowledge in mechanotransduction and cell-matrix adhesion signaling will be critical for developing preclinical microphysiological tools during her time as a postdoc in the Polacheck Lab.

Welcome to McKenzie Garcia, who recently joined the lab as a graduate student. She will be working on a number of different projects as she seeks to build on her considerable skill sets in 3D printing and additive manufacturing. Welcome to the team!

Madeline Singletary, an incredibly hard working and creative undergraduate researcher, will continue her work in the Polacheck Lab as a technician over the next year. This opportunity will allow her to further develop photocrosslinkable human cell-derived hydrogels, a technology that she has been developing throughout her undergraduate honors thesis.

Sree Elayaperumal, an Abrams Scholar and honors research thesis candidate in the Polacheck Lab, was awarded teh Barry Goldwater Scholarship for undergraduate research. The scholarship is one of the most prestigious undergraduate awards in the US and was established by Congress to support college sophomores and juniors who demonstrate exceptional acadmic achievement and a committment to research. The UNC BME press release can be found here . Congratulations, Sree!

Abel Abraham, a former undergraduate researcher in the group and currently a PhD candidate in Mechanical Engineering at M.I.T., was awarded a graduate research fellowship from the NSF. This is one of a long, long list of well-deserved awards for Abel, including the Henderson Award for Mathematics, and a Fulbright Scholarship. Congratulations, Abel!

Congrats to Akash Bhowmik, a summer undergraduate researcher in our lab, who won 1st place for an undergraduate poster at the 2024 Triangle Computational and Applied Mathematics Symposium. Awesome work!

Awesome talk by an awesome post-bac in our lab, Aanya Sawhney on cell mechanics of vascular malformations in the vascular bioengineering session at BMES 2024 !

Congratulations to Polacheck Lab undergraduate, Abel Abraham, for winning the 2024 Henderson Medal from the Department of Mathematics at UNC. This medal is awarded by the Department of Mathematics to undergraduate students for excellence in Mathematics: specifically in demonstrating a high degree of mathematical ability and the greatest promise of originality in the field. Well-deserved!

Elizabeth is the first PhD student to graduate from the Polacheck Lab. She walked at the departmental commencement on Friday, May 10. Congratulations, Dr. Doherty; we'll miss you!

Abel gives a talk on his computational flow modeling project with the lab at the BME seminar. Great job, Abel!

Elizabeth defended her thesis on Cell-Derived Matrix platforms for microphysiological modeling of Vascular Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Congratulations, Dr. Doherty!

It was a year filled with new people and collaborations, myriad achievements, and countless hurdles overcome. Congratulations!