Hello

I grew up in a small town in rural Ohio, and no one expected me to be an engineer -- including myself. As a freshman entering college at Ohio University with a scholarship, I shocked many people by choosing to study chemical engineering. I was inspired by Dr. Doug Goetz, a professor who used chemical engineering to create new therapeutics for inflammatory diseases. The possibility of using my education to help people who are sick and injured was exciting and  motivated me to pursue this hard major. I remember calling Dr. Goetz as a high school student and he talked with me and encouraged me to pursue this career path. I worked with him on this mission of creating new therapeutics for 3.5 years and concurrently worked with Dr. Sunggyu Lee for 2 years on advanced materials development. These experiences solidified my love for research and desire to pursue a PhD in biomaterials. 

I moved to Gainesville, Florida to pursue my PhD in biomedical engineering working with Dr. Jon Dobson and Dr. Peter McFetridge to design a drug delivery platform capable of delivering thousands of proteins derived from human placental tissues on-demand for wound healing. This was the first delivery platform of its kind and we patented this system. I worked on additional projects that utilized magnetic nanoparticles for biomedical applications, such as removal of cytokines from blood during open heart surgery to reduce post-op inflammation and analysis of nanoparticle properties that lead to increased heat production for their application as cancer hyperthermia agents. At UF, I discovered my love for mentoring and teaching, and decided that I wanted to be a professor. I was blessed with the opportunity to mentor numerous brilliant and talented students who continuously inspired me. I also realized that sexism and racism were prevalent issues not only for me, but also my undergraduate students and colleagues, and I was moved to create the University of Florida BME DEI club. Our club hosted numerous events on campus that celebrated diversity in STEM and educated against bias.
 

After receiving my PhD, I moved to Colorado School of Mines to work with Dr. Anuj Chauhan developing novel drug delivery platforms. Here, I was awarded the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and was able to improve my discipline specific knowledge, synthesis skills, and grant writing skills.  I worked on a wide-array of projects that were fun and helped me become more creative in designing new platforms: a microparticle-based platform for single dose vaccine delivery, contact lenses for drug delivery to the eye, emulsions for anti-inflammatory mouthwash, and amphiphilic nanoparticles for drug delivery to the back of the eye. Not to mention, it was great to get some fresh mountain air after completing my PhD.

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I was then selected as an Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow in biomedical engineering at University of Texas at Austin. This has truly been a once in a lifetime opportunity because the biomedical engineering program focuses on health equity, and provided the perfect opportunity for me to combine my passions for drug delivery and biomaterials with health equity and social justice. Here, I have learned how to utilize my skills to best help underrepresented patients that suffer from health disparities, and I have worked with Dr. Mykel Green and Dr. Elizabeth Cosgriff-Hernandez to create guidelines for other engineers to follow to do the same. My main project is working with Dr. Nicholas Peppas, a leader in BME and founder of the drug delivery field, to create an oral delivery platform for siRNA to treat patients with inflammatory bowel diseases. The leading treatment for these diseases currently are antibodies delivered by I.V. infusions that are not accessible to patients with low socioeconomic background, so an oral platform would revolutionize treatment for these patients.

 

This work collectively has inspired the vision for my lab: creating nanotechnologies to improve patient access to therapies and analyzing often ignored variables between patients such as biological sex, ancestry, and age to create more personalized therapies, rather than approaching medicine from a one-size-fits-all perspective. I recognize that I have been blessed with opportunities that countless talented young people do not receive, and I want to use my position in academia to help create more opportunities for these students and continue to break down barriers traditionally imposed on women and underrepresented groups in STEM.

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