Rebecca Schulman
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Biomedical Engineering
Far too few donor organs exist for the millions of people with organ failure. Growing working tissue in the lab could help fill that gap, but lab-grown tissues still struggle to form blood vessels and to arrange different cell types into structures that work.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
Materials Science
- Topics
tissue engineering
biomaterials
molecular programming
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2028
What they work on
- Develop active biomaterial scaffolds with embedded molecular programs that deliver precisely timed, spatially localized signals to cells, mimicking the changing cues of natural development.
- Apply programmed scaffolds to kidney tissue to coordinate the multiple specialized cell types needed to form functional filtering units.
- Establish a general, open-source framework for programming tissue development that can be adapted to organoids and engineered tissues from other organ systems.
More about the research
One likely reason is that a developing body gives cells constantly changing instructions. These come as gradients of signaling molecules, mechanical forces and feedback loops that let cells organize themselves over time. Current lab methods cannot recreate those cues.
Why it matters
Lab-grown replacement tissue could offer a more widely available option for people with organ failure, who now depend on scarce donor organs. Scaffolds that guide tissue development could also support personalized therapies, disease modeling and faster drug screening, starting with kidney tissue.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Alex Hughes
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Biomedical Engineering
Map how tissue mechanics and cell-cell signaling jointly shape epithelial tissue in kidney and lung organoids, using independent optogenetic (light-controlled) handles to control organoid cell composition.
Samira Musah
Duke University, NC·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Use human stem cell-derived kidney models, including organoids and organ-on-chip systems, to identify tunable molecular targets that let specific cell types sense injury and trigger tissue repair.
Calin Belta
Boston University, MA·Engineering
Develop machine learning methods that classify and quantify multicellular patterns in tissue, so that pattern design can be translated into a well-posed optimization problem.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.