Michael Hill, PhD, researcher in the Department of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics, has received an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship in the amount of $104,060 over two years.
The funding is for his proposal on “Nanoengineered Polymers for Mature Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Derived Cardiomyocytes.”
The goal of the proposal is to produce multiscale materials that can mimic the signals which govern cell behavior in the human heart, in order to guide stem cells into becoming cardiac muscle cells.
Dr. Hill and colleagues work in the lab of Assistant Professor Parisa Abadi, where they are using nanomaterials to develop solutions to medical problems. Due to the shortage of organ donors, myocardial infarction—or heart attack—is one of the major killers in the United States. The research team is seeking to use nanomaterials to engineer systems that can provide viable cardiac muscle cells for cell therapy post-myocardial infarction. These studies could provide a rationale for nanoscale material design for producing patient-specific cardiac cells which help regenerate damaged heart tissue.