Mary Regier, a senior fellow in Assistant Professor Kelly Stevens’ lab, has been inducted as one of 10 inaugural Washington Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellows. This award seeks to support highly creative and dedicated postdoctoral scientists within Washington state who conduct groundbreaking work that addresses unmet public needs. The ultimate goal of the program is for Fellows’ research to benefit the public through the creation of products and services. The award provides up to $275,000 of funding over three years for salary support, benefits, research supplies, equipment and travel to scientific meetings/conferences. Learn more about the Washington Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.
Dr. Regier’s research focuses on developing new technologies for controlling biochemical signal and other soluble factor patterns across cell populations, and understanding how cells respond to these patterns. In normal physiology and disease, patterns such as gradients of dissolved signals control cell functions spatially and dynamically so that cells can work together to respond to different conditions. Dr. Regier aims to make it possible and straightforward to recreate this kind of control in the lab so researchers can answer important questions about how signal patterns influence cells in healthy and diseased tissues.
The Stevens laboratory seeks to hijack and rewire aspects of nature’s developmental programs in order to control the processes by which communities of cells assemble to form human systems. To do this, the lab uses diverse tools taken from stem cell biology, tissue engineering, synthetic biology, micro/nanofabrication, and bioprinting. The lab integrates these technologies to build human platforms for understanding and treating infectious disease, interrogating biological programming in human development, and controlling artificial tissues for organ regeneration in animal model systems. Ultimately, the lab seeks to translate their work into new therapies for patients with heart and liver disease.