A team of University of Iowa scholars led by faculty affiliates with the Iowa Technology Institute released findings this week expanding the understanding of the role fat tissue plays in healing wounds and may help to uncover and develop fat-related wound healing treatments.

Finished our intense four-week summer class entitled "Synthetic Biology Laboratory" with my co-instructor, Dr. Jan Fassler. In addition to the wet lab, this time I added a modeling laboratory exercise using the Simbiology toolbox in Matlab. What fun!

Our Senior Design Team's project "Dressing Down the Cost of Burn Treatment" won 3rd place at the Design of Medical Devices Conference in Minneapolis. The team, mentored by myself, Dr. James Ankrum, and Dr. Mark Fisher, worked on developing honey-based alginate hydrogels for treating burns in low- and middle-income countries.

Advanced BioMatrix selected our paper "Mouse Keratinocytes Without Keratin Intermediate Filaments Demonstrate Substrate Stiffness Dependent Behaviors" as one of their top 15 publications of 2018.

The UIOWA iGEM team competed in the 2018 iGEM Jamboree in Boston and was awarded a Bronze Medal.

Congratulations to undergraduate and recent lab alum Alyssa Mendenhall for landing a job at Miromatrix Medical in Minneapolis. We all wish you luck! Please come back and teach us a thing or two about using decellularized matrix for regenerative engineering applications.

Spencer Halberg wins 3rd place in the Undergraduate Competition at the 2018 World Congress of Biomechanics in Dublin.

I am happy to announce that I have accepted the role of an associate editor for the BMES journal Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering. I am very excited to work with Editor Michael King and the rest of the editorial board on one of my favorite journals.

We got our first cover! Congratulations to Hoda Zarkoob and collaborators.

Respectable Stats from our 2016 PLoS One Publication.