Materials Science and Engineering Seminar - Professor Cole DeForest of the University of Washington (Building 6, Room 104)

Engineering heterogeneous multicellular tissue with native complexity remains one of the holy grails of regenerative medicine and basic biological research. As success in this regard would yield powerful bioengineered constructs useful in functional transplantation, high-throughput drug screening, and fundamental biology investigation, research efforts in the University of Washington’s Cole A. DeForest’s lab have centered on developing and implementing tools to spatiotemporally customize living cell function both from the “outside-in” and from the “inside-out.”

In this talk, DeForest will discuss some of his group’s recent successes in reversibly modifying the chemical and physical aspects of synthetic cell culture platforms with user-defined and grayscale control, regulating cell-biomaterial interactions through user-programmable Boolean logic, engineering microvascular networks that span nearly all size scales of native human vasculature (including capillaries), irreversibly photoassembling bioactive proteins within living cells, and driving biomolecular condensate formation using de novo-designed proteins. Results will highlight the group’s ability to modulate intricate cellular behavior, including stem cell differentiation, protein secretion, genome editing, and cell–cell interactions in 4D.