Lab barbeque at Chris’ to say goodbyes to graduates, congratulations to many, welcomes to new team members, and to throw exploding burritos at each other in no-holds barred, vicious game of speed card playing. One year, we *must* remember to take a group picture.
With extreme gratitude and thanks to the Canada Foundation for Innovation, we have completed renovations on our advanced materials and biofabrication cleanroom facility! This Class 100 cleanroom is a HEPA-filtered and dust-free box, and boasts photolithography, spin-coating, plasma oxidation, 3D printing, xurography, and elastomeric processing facilities, to make microscale devices in a variety of materials.
This facility brought to you through many hours of organization and heavy lifting by Karthick, Nick, Nik, Ray, and Chen who’ve been working on this for several months!
Several papers recently out in Advanced Functional Materials, Langmuir, Biofabrication, Lab on a Chip, and Tissue Engineering C from first authors Nik (undergrad research!), Sanya, Lisa, Arvind, and Sarah; with help from several lab members. Congratulations everyone on the outstanding team effort. In keeping with our unusual lab traditions, the sword of victory got to meet several cakes and the ice-cream sandwich of destiny.
Congratulations to Sonya, who successfully completed all the requirements for her Masters thesis today! She figured out how to better tissue engineer models of lung airway epithelial cells, by manipulating oxygen content in the microenvironment, and her thesis garnered rave reviews. Well done Sonya – you’ve come a long way from being the lab Undergrad #1!
Congratulations to Gabe and Nik who received NSERC PGS-D and CGS-M awards to support their work in developing new culture models and tools to study breast cancer and immune system activity! And BIG Congratulations to Steph, who was awarded a prestigious CGS-D for her next year of doctoral studies!
Wontae, Nik, and Stephanie publish their outstanding efforts over the last several years in Nature Communications! Cells actively push and pull when they’re inside 3D tissues to ‘sculpt’ tissues from within. Here, our team engineered microscale hydrogel sensors to “see” the forces that a cell is feeling inside tissues. With our collaborators at McGill, the Goodman Cancer Research Center, Georgia Tech, the University of Michigan, and SUNY-Buffalo, we figured out how these forces contribute to tissue structure and function. Just like your skin keeps your insides in, cells that are on the outside of tissues spontaneously pull to form a ‘skin’ of highly contractile cells that squeeze the tissue to create highly compressed core. Check out the full paper at Nature Communications or on our publications page. Talk about starting off strong with our New Year’s resolutions!
And in the news! McGill NewsRoom
Congratulations to Sarah Dubois, who received the Jean Beliveau Athletic Award, primarily for her prowess on the soccer field, but also because she brought that sense of teamwork, leadership and community to all the work she’s done in the lab over the last few years. Congratulations!
To thank the Défi Canderel for their incredible effort in supporting cancer research, the Goodman Cancer Research Center produced a video outlining how this support is being used to tackle challenging problems in cancer. This year’s video features our own Gabe Brewer, check it out on the GCRC Facebook page!
Big congratulations to Sanya, Zhenwei and Lisa, each of whom completed their Masters degrees this term! Sanya designed a series of microfluidic devices to better understand bacteria and how they interact with mammalian cells; Zhenwei discovered that mechanical forces play a big role in the complex developmental process of growing a baby; and Lisa developed a startlingly easy and effective way of culturing spheroids in ultra high-throughput culture formats. Congratulations, Masters of the Microenvironment!
Chris and his significantly better half, Stef Moraes (*p<0.001) have been working with the Shad Valley program for many years, where they teach high school students how to go about attacking “wicked problems”: impossibly large societal issues that will, for better or worse, define Canada in the near future. This year’s McGill program was featured on CTV, where Shads have been running around the Wong building trying to figure out how to make communities more resilient to natural disasters. Not sure why they thought Chris was an economics professor though… maybe he wasn’t making any cents?
