Current Members

Nenad Bursac

Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Embryonic and adult stem cell therapies for heart and muscle disease; cardiac and skeletal muscle tissue engineering; cardiac electrophysiology and arrhythmias; genetic modifications of stem and somatic cells; micropatterning of proteins and hydrogels.

Alastair Khodabukus

I work on developing more physiologically relevant tissue engineered skeletal muscle to study both healthy and diseased muscle physiology in human and rat cells.

Yongwu Li

I will provide Rodent surgery support for cardiac muscle and skeleton muscle tissue engineering studies.

Paula Scotland

Ike Emerson

I am studying the role of MAPK signaling in RASopathies to understand the signals that lead to cardiac hypertrophy versus hyperplasia.

Joonbum Lee

I work on the innervation and vascularization of tissue engineered skeletal muscle to enhance the cellular complexity of the in vitro model.

Tianyu Wu

My research focuses on developing prokaryotic voltage-gated sodium channels (BacNav) based gene therapies for cardiac arrhythmias.

Mia Ridolfo

Claire Pinnie

Amber Detwiler

I am studying the role of macrophages in dysferlinopathy for their implementation in a tissue engineered skeletal muscle model.

Marisa Patsy

I am interested in the relationship between neurons and cardiomyocytes in the context of cardiac innervation, regeneration, and disease.

Tara Sheehan

I am developing a human iPSC-derived co-culture tissue model to study cardiomyocyte-macrophage interactions. 

Yiu Yan Siu

I am interested in sodium channel trafficking and developing gene therapy for arrhythmia.

Alex Schneider

I am working with Amber to study the role of macrophages in dysferlinopathy using our tissue engineered skeletal muscle model.

Wanyu Zhang

I’m working with Tianyu to optimize BacNav gene therapy in cardiomyocytes. 

Nathan Mulugeta

I am working with Marisa to support experiments investigating cardiac innervation using engineered cardiac tissue models.