NSF award to Rajagopalan on transitional tissue engineering

Padma Rajagopalan has received a three-year, $390,000 award from the Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems (CBET) Division NSF to study transitional tissue engineering. This project focuses on engineering a liver tissue that exhibits a gradient in both mechanical and chemical properties. The goal of the project is to use such a tissue to determine to what extent must chemical and mechanical profiles vary in the liver in order to sustain hepatic fibrosis and to understand how the major hepatic cells respond to stiffer matrices and varying chemical concentrations.