We have four undergraduate students doing research with us this summer! Devon Ennis (Lehigh BIOE ’25), Santiago Lazarte (FSU BME ’24), and Juan Mendoza (Lehigh MSE ’24) were accepted to Lehigh’s STEM-SI program and Juliana Forero Arevalo (Lehigh ChBE ’24) received a Rossin Undergraduate Research Fellowship to support her work this summer and during the academic year. We are especially excited to welcome Santiago Lazarte from the Krick Lab at Florida State University! We have been collaborating with Santiago and the Krick Lab for several years, so it is wonderful to have finally have an in-person collaboration for a full summer. Learn more about their projects below!
Devon will be focusing on peptide and conjugate synthesis and shifting from the enzyme-sensitive conjugate project to our cornea project led by graduate student John Tolbert (Lehigh MSE ’18 PSE ’23G) in collaboration with Dr. Amelia Zellander (BioLattice).
Juliana will continue her work on enzyme-sensitive peptide-polymer conjugates in collaboration with the Grayson Lab at Johns Hopkins and Pashuck Lab at Lehigh. She will be taking the lead from our Natasha Hunt (Lehigh BIOE ’21 ’23G) as Natasha wraps up her MS thesis.
Santiago will use predictive models he developed in the Krick Lab to design and print scaffolds with different architectures but matching stiffnesses. This will be achieved by 3D printing with inks containing different polymer molecular weight ratios to control filament modulus.
Juan will continue his work 3D printing with different filament diameters. He will characterize how filament diameter and polymer molecular weight ratio affect filament tensile modulus. His work will contribute key data needed to expand our predictive models developed by Santiago in the Krick Lab.