The Santerre Lab welcomes two new undergraduate students for the summer! Read more about their summer projects below.
Kirtana Devaraj:
“I am Kirtana Devaraj, an incoming 3rd year Chemical Engineering student at UofT. My project this summer is based on engineering a vascular wall from human fat for small diameter arterial reconstruction. The first aspect is analyzing scRNA-seq data of human adipose tissue to elucidate the heterogeneity of human adipose tissue-derived microvascular ECs (HAMVECs) and determine cell-surface markers for isolating the arterial sub-population. The second aspect of the project is to quantify metrics of endothelial morphogenesis from immunofluorescence images of HAMVECs seeded on an electrospun polyurethane membrane. I am looking forward to working on the project this summer!”
Willa Wei:
"Hi everyone! My name is Willa. I finished my third year of undergraduate in Chemical Engineering at University of Toronto. I am excited to be joining Dr. Santerre’s lab and working with Yizhou this summer! My project is a part of Yizhou’s project with the goal of developing methods for generating hiPSC-CM islets carried by gelatin D-PHI/PCNU co-electrospun scaffold. Under the supervision of Dr. Santerre and Yizhou, I will investigate the mechanical properties, in vitro degradation rate, and in vitro cardiomyocyte biocompatibility of this scaffold. The scaffold will be placed in 50 units/mL collagenase and cholesterol esterase PBS solution at 37 °C. Weight loss of the scaffold with respect to time will be recorded. Degraded samples will also be imaged using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to gain insight into the pattern of scaffold structure changes as they degrade. This scaffold should provide a favourable niche environment to enable cardiac cell survival after they are implanted, and will have the potential to repair and replace damaged heart muscle tissues and cells. In my spare time, I enjoy cooking and playing the piano."