Abstract: The vascular system adapts its structure across cellular, tissue, and full organism scales to support metabolic activity and cellular trafficking during healthy and pathological processes, in vivo.  The growth of fully functional tissues for regenerative medicine and tissue-scale biology requires the recapitulation of this dynamic structure, in vivo.  Yet, even the purely architectural complexity of the vascular system poses insurmountable challenges for today’s fabrication technologies.  We hypothesize that successful vascular engineering will require the orchestration of top-down fabrication strategies with the developmental programs of vascular endothelial cells.  In this presentation, I will discuss our progress toward this goal based on microengineered matrices, microfluidic tools, and mathematical modelling. 

Bio-Sketch: Abraham Stroock is the Gordon L. Dibble ’50 Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University.  His research relates to engineering microchemical process with an emphasis on transport phenomena, thermodynamics, and physiology.   Current projects in his laboratory include:  1) the development microfluidic platforms with which to manipulate metastable states of liquid water for the pursuit of fundamental questions in physical chemistry, plant physiology, and environmental transport and with applications in heat transfer and environmental sensing, and 2) the engineering of mammalian microvascular structure for studies of tissue-scale developmental processes and applications in regenerative medicine.  He obtained his PhD in Chemical Physics in 2002 from Harvard University.  He has received a MIT Technology Review TR35 Award and an NSF CAREER Award.