Current Members

Principal Investigator

Bursac

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.

Research Scientists

Khodabukus

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.

Li

Yongwu Li

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

Laboratory Staff

Post-Doctoral Associates

JoonbumLee.PNG

Joonbum Lee

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

Strash

Nicholas Strash

I am currently interested in studying the role of polyploidy in the context of proliferation and maturation of human iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes.

Wu

Tianyu Wu

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

Graduate Students

Broer

Torie Broer

I am  studying how the presence of immune cells affects the development and function of engineered skeletal muscle tissue.

DeLuca

Sophia DeLuca

I am working on cardiomyocyte proliferation in the context of regeneration.

Detwiler

Amber Detwiler

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

Helfer

Abbi Helfer

I work on human cardiac tissue engineering from pluripotent stem cells, and gene editing.

Jiang

Xixian Jiang

I am interested in studying the signaling pathways regulating cardiomyocyte proliferation and maturation.

Patsy

Marisa Patsy

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

Dylan Silkstone

Dylan Silkstone

I am studying the role of dysferlin in cardiac and skeletal muscle to identify protective mechanisms in dysferlinopathy.

Siu

Yiu Yan Siu

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

Undergraduate Students

Tejeda

Libby Tejeda

I am researching the mechanism behind cardiomyocyte proliferation for regenerative therapy application.