It is with a mix of fierce joy and heartfelt sadness that we report the successful thesis defenses of DOCTORS Wontae Lee, Carley Ort, and Raymond Tran. CONGRATULATIONS! Rock solid performances, and super insightful work into the nature of mechanical force and stiffness evolution in various tissues, and developmentally biomimetic strategies for pancreas mechano-engineering. These three have formed the backbone of the lab for many years, and will be missed greatly.
How many Nick’s can we fit into a lab? We’re on a quest to find out. A big welcome to Nicholas Wong, our newest masters student, who brings a wealth of interest in immunology, and our current-Nick-total to 4. That’s >25% of the lab.
Stephanie successfully defended her PhD! She never thought this day would come, but the world of cellular-length scale mechanical characterization will never be the same. Outstanding work Dr. Mok!
Talk about missed opportunities! How did we not realize this before? Last year, Arvind and team published a particularly neat concept paper on sinkable microboats for stiffness-tunable lung cultures. Making the boats with a porous hydrogel bottom allowed us to reliably transition cells between submerged and air-liquid interface, needed for lung epithelial cell differentiation and monitoring. One year later, we realized that we had developed an organ-on-a-ship… and will kick ourselves for several years for letting that opportunity for a pun pass us by. Oh well. Water under the boat. That ship has sailed =(
On behalf of the lab, Chris received the 2020 McGill Principal’s Prize for Outstanding Emerging Researchers! Announced at the Fall convocation ceremony, this prize recognizes 3 researchers from across McGill “… for inspiring and motivating us to seek answers and fulfill our thirst for knowledge”. Now that’s pretty awesome =) Go team!
Ray’s recent paper on controlled self-clustering of induced pluripotent stem cells being differentiated towards a pancreatic lineage was recognized with the Publication Prize for the 2020 Summer Competition from ThéCell, a provincial research network focused on cell-based therapies. This exciting research program, in collaboration with the Hoesli lab, suggests new ways to improve pancreatic differentiation strategies to ultimately bioengineer stem-cell based solutions for diabetes.
BIG congratulations to Camille, Karthick, and Nick who received three years of NSERC support for their doctoral studies in neural tube morphogenesis, placental tissue engineering, and anti-bacterial nanostructured surfaces! Especially big congratulations to Nick, who received an even more prestigious Canada Graduate Scholarship. We’re incredibly grateful to NSERC and to federally-funded research into these fundamental studies.
Encouraging induced pluripotent stem cells to make their way towards forming pancreatic cells just got a bit easier: Ray shows that culturing iPSCs in physically defined patches creates conditions that mechanically push cells more efficiently towards expressing pancreatic markers, in the most recent edition of Nature’s Scientific Reports!
Epic all-out miroenvironmental design competition at the Moraes lab holiday party. Which gingerbread house will impress, and which will suffer the ultimate ignominy of being devoured? The thrill of victory. The agony of defeat. The bribery of the judges. Plotting, sabotage, subterfuge, catapults, buoyant balloons, speeding gumdrops. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You won’t find this good a drama on Netflix.
