Key techniques

• Formulation, development and processing of polymer composites and hybrid materials
• Electrospinning, solution blow spinning, and stereolithography
• XRD, 1H NMR, 29Si MAS NMR, MALDI-TOF, TGA, DSC, CD, SEM, FTIR
• Chitosan, gelatin, silk, PEG, thiol-ene click, SPPS, silica sol-gels

Work summary

When I wasn't attending lectures during my undergrad I spend most of my time in labs creating materials for tissue engineering with very little supervision. During, this period I was involved with the publication of 4 articles. I also spend a year at a medical device company. Along with the heavy focus on material chemistry I built a rotary collector and solution blow spinning set up using off the shelf materials.

I produced porous sol-gel hybrid fibres by cryogenic solution blow spinning with the potential of controlled mechanical properties and degradation rates for hard to soft tissue engineering applications.

It is a challenge to replicate some of the biochemical patterns indicative of natural extracellular matrix (ECM) to promote cell growth and guidance. During the project I developed a patterning techniques to spatial localize biomolecule on nanofibres materials. I also developed a platform to pattern chitosan-norbornene fibres using photo-click chemistry towards this aim.

Publications

• Synthesis and characterization of fluorescent pyrene-end-capped polylactide fibres. Polymer International 68 (3), 360-368
• Porous, aligned, and biomimetic fibres of regenerated silk fibroin produced by solution blow spinning. Biomacromolecules 19 (12), 4542-4553
• Exploiting inherent instability of 2D black phosphorus for controlled phosphate release from blow-spun poly(lactide-co-glycolide) nanofibers. ACS Applied Nano Materials 1 (8), 4190-4197
• Hybrid sol-gel inorganic/gelatin porous fibres via solution blow spinning. Journal of Materials Science 52 (15), 9066-9081

Posters and Talks

2016: MSE Engineering Darmstadt

2017: Scandinavian Society for Biomaterials

2018: Scandinavian Society for Biomaterials