"Modular Hydrogel Design to Model Health and Disease"

This event is sponsored by FAMU-FSU Engineering Department of Chemical & Biomedical Engineering.

Emerging challenges in medicine require advanced biomaterials to address multifaceted problems. Drug delivery devices must release multiple drugs at reliable rates without spurring unintended immune responses. 3D tumor microenvironment models are needed to evaluate the mechanical and soluble signaling pathways that contribute to metastasis and drug resistance. During my Ph.D., I developed the Swollen Polymer Network Model as a framework to predictably control multiple physical properties of hydrogels, starting with swelling, stiffness, and solute transport within hydrogels. I then demonstrated that four structural design parameters represented by the model can be manipulated to independently tune stiffness and solute transport within multi-arm poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) hydrogels. For my postdoctoral work, I have refined the biochemical aspects of multi-arm PEG hydrogel design, comparing how mechanosignaling and hydrogel-restricted protein transport influence breast cancer cell metabolism and growth. These projects establish a modular approach to hydrogel design that facilitates precise mechanistic explorations of how cell-environment interactions determine the tipping points between healthy recovery and disease progression.

Nathan Richbourg, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Biomedical Engineering

Tufts University

Dr. Nathan Richbourg is a postdoctoral fellow at Tufts University, supported by the Organ Design and Engineering Training (ODET) T32 fellowship and the IRACDA program. Nathan works with Professor Shelly Peyton to evaluate how the bone marrow microenvironment contributes to the dormancy and drug resistance of metastasized breast cancer cells. He completed his B.S. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Oklahoma in 2018 and earned the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship based on his bone tissue engineering undergraduate research experience. He received his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin in 2022, advised by Professor Nicholas Peppas. His website, HydrogelDesign.org, engages an international community of biomaterials researchers, advancing model-driven optimization of hydrogels for diverse applications. His work coordinates fundamental polymer physics with cell-ECM interactions to evaluate how the human body dynamically responds to diseases. He is excited to train new generations of diverse engineers and researchers at the interface of chemical engineering and modular medicine.