Joselle McCracken
TCNJ Chemistry Alum, U. Illinois Urbana Campaign

November 4, 2015
11:00 am – 12:00 pm
C-121

“Not Just Plastic: 3D Printing for Hydrogels for Tissue Engineering…And Other Things I Learned in Grad School”

Abstract: This talk will cover how 3D printing technologies have flourished in the past decade and how diversifying printable material types is crucial for the field to remain relevant long-term.  This is particularly true for tissue engineering contexts, in which it is not enough for printers to fabricate life-like replicas of organs, but necessary for them to print spatially programmatic, temporally dynamic, and biocompliant materials on which cells can attach, grow, and differentiate into functional tissues.  Here, several printable hydrogel systems will be presented that are promising for these applications which use the monomer hydroxyethyl methacrylate (HEMA) in conjunction with viscosifying agents such as polymer powders and inorganic clays to fabricate scaffolds at bioactive scales.  I will also discuss how these areas of my research focus emerged gradually in a semi-independent, at times chaotic, and thoroughly nonlinear way over four years in graduate school.  I will talk about, in retrospect, some of the most important questions that I may or may not have asked during the graduate school application and selection process.