| Affiliations: | |
| Project Leader: | Victoria Albright victoria.albright@tamu.edu Materials Science & Engineering |
| Faculty Mentor: | Svetlana Sukhishvili, Ph.D. |
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Meeting Times:
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Fall 2016 |
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Team Size:
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2 (Team Full) |
| Open Spots: | 0 |
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Special Opportunities:
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Hard working students will be rewarded with opportunities to present their work at a conference, earn co-authorship on publications or even become a full member of our research group. |
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Team Needs:
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All majors are invited to apply but science & engineering majors will be given preference. A willingness to learn is more important than grades in class or prior experience (so don’t be afraid to apply!) |
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Description:
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The future of polymeric materials as biological implant coatings to prevent bacterial infection and stimulate cell growth depends on the ability to selectively trigger the release of components from the materials on demand. Our research group currently explores manipulating chemistry of polymer particles and films in order to develop polymeric materials that can deliver antibiotics and cell stimulating factors in a controlled fashion. This work will explore block copolymer micelles that are temperature responsive and correlate the ratio of block copolymer components to physical properties of the micelles as well as to their ability to encapsulate and release small molecules (i.e. antimicrobials, cell stimulating growth factors, etc.) In the future, these micelles will be deposited on substrates and tested with both bacterial and cell cultures. Students are needed to help choose better drugs to incorporate into the films, understand the optimal conditions to deposit micelles, explore encapsulation conditions for drugs into micelles and develop a method to incorporate these micelles into biodegradable matrices. The project may further evolve into developing additional layer-by-layer systems for biomedical coatings. Check out our recent work on biomedical polymer coatings that was featured in Science here:http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn500674g as well as two of our works on micelles http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn900655z, and http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168365913003787. |