Achievement

Kirsten Kinneberg working with her IGERT advisor, David Butler (Biomedical Engineering), is focusing on tissue engineering, specifically to identify optimal scaffold pore sizes that provide mechanical integrity to the tissue engineered construct while permitting cells to uniformly disperse in the pores and set up their own extracellular matrices. Working with Dr. Heather Powell (Materials Science and Biomedical Engineering, Ohio State), Kirsten has created three collagen scaffolds of controlled pore size. The conclusion reached in these studies was that pore sizes in the 150 'm range produce constructs whose cells are most responsive to mechanical signals and generate the highest in vitro stiffness.