Dr. Shelly Peyton, Associate Professor and Barry & Afsaneh Siadat Career Development Faculty Fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at University of Massachusetts Amherst, will present the 2018 Mellichamp Lecture. Hosted by the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, Dr. Peyton will present a lecture, Tissue Inspired Hydrogel Design, on Tuesday, October 16 at 3:00 pm in Forney Hall of Chemical Engineering room G140. The event is free and open to the public.
Dr. Shelly Peyton, Associate Professor and Barry & Afsaneh Siadat Career Development Faculty Fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at University of Massachusetts Amherst, will present the 2018 Mellichamp Lecture. Hosted by the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, Dr. Peyton will present a lecture, Tissue Inspired Hydrogel Design, on Tuesday, October 16 at 3:00 pm in Forney Hall of Chemical Engineering room G140. The event is free and open to the public.
Improved in vitro models are needed to better understand cancer progression and bridge the gap between in vitro proof-of-concept studies, in vivo validation, and clinical application. Many methods exist to create biomaterial platforms, including hydrogels, which Dr. Peyton uses to study cells in contexts more akin to what they experience in vivo. Her lab has multiple approaches to create such biomaterials, based on combinations of poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) with peptides and zwitterions. In this presentation, Dr. Peyton will discuss her findings in using these cell culture environments to understand the role of the extracellular matrix (ECM): ligand density, stiffness, geometry, etc., in controlling cancer cell innate drug response via adaptive signaling.
Dr. Shelly Peyton received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University in 2002 and went on to obtain her M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Peyton was then an NIH Kirschstein post-doctoral fellow in the Biological Engineering department at MIT before starting her academic appointment at UMass in 2011, where she leads an interdisciplinary group seeking to create and apply novel biomaterials platforms toward new solutions to grand challenges in human health. Her lab utilizes a unique approach, using their engineering expertise to build simplified models of human tissue with synthetic biomaterials. These tissue mimics are engineered to capture a subset of the mechanical and chemical features of human tissue, and are cheap and reproducible. With these, Peyton’s lab studies how cell-material interactions in tissues affect drug response toward better patient outcomes. They use these systems to understand 1) the physical relationship between metastatic breast cancer cells and tissues to which they spread, 2) how tissue-specific stem cells remodel tissues to facilitate metastasis, and 3) the role of matrix remodeling in drug resistance. Dr. Peyton is a Pew Biomedical Scholar, received a New Innovator Award from the NIH, and she was awarded a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation.
The Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Lectureship was established in 2013 to recognize the work of a distinguished young researcher in any area related to the field of chemical engineering. The recipient is selected by the School of Chemical Engineering faculty in recognition of his or her contributions to research and education.
Read more at https://engineering.purdue.edu/ChE/events/2018/2018-mellichamp-lecture-dr-shelly-peyton.
