Ali Khademhosseini, Ph.D.
Center for Biomedical Engineering
Department of Medicine
Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School
Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, MIT

EPH 201, Eric Palin Hall
Ryerson University
87 Gerrard Street East, Toronto   map

Micro- and nanoscale technologies are emerging as powerful tools for controlling the interaction between cells and their surroundings for biological studies, tissue engineering, and cell-based screening.  In addition, hydrogel biomaterials have been increasingly used in various tissue engineering applications since they provide cells with a hydrated 3D microenvironment that mimics the native extracellular matrix. In our lab we have developed various approaches to merge microscale techniques with hydrogel biomaterials for directing stem cell differentiation and generating complex 3D tissues.

In this talk, I will outline our work in controlling the cell-microenvironment interactions by using patterned hydrogels to direct the differentiation of stem cells.  In addition, I will describe the fabrication and the use of microscale hydrogels for tissue engineering by using a 'bottom-up' and a 'top-down' approach. Top-down approaches for fabricating complex engineered tissues involve the use of miniaturization techniques to control cell-cell interactions or to recreate biomimetic microvascular networks within mesoscale hydrogels.

Our group has also pioneered bottom-up approaches to generate tissues by the assembly of shape-controlled cell-laden microgels (i.e. tissue building blocks), that resemble functional tissue units.
In this approach, microgels were fabricated and seeded with different cell types and induced to self assemble to generate 3D tissue structures with controlled microarchitecture and cell-cell interactions.

Ali Khademhosseini is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard-MIT's Division of Health Sciences and Technology and the Harvard Medical School. His research is based on developing micro- and nanoscale technologies to control cellular behavior with particular emphasis in developing microscale biomaterials and engineering systems for tissue engineering. His laboratory is currently pioneering technologies to control the formation of ascularized tissues with appropriate microarchitectures as well as regulating stem cell differentiation within microengineered systems. He has published 1 edited book, 65 peer reviewed papers, 19 book chapters, 100 abstracts, and 14 patent applications.  His work has been published in journals such as PNAS, JACS, Advanced Materials, Biomaterials, Lab on a chip, Langmuir and Tissue Engineering and highlighted in Nature, Scientific American and Technology Review Magazine. He has chaired and organized numerous symposia and sessions in the area of BioMEMS, micro and nanofabricated biomaterials, and micro/nanoscale drug delivery/tissue engineering. Also, he has been invited to give greater than 80 seminars at various academic and industrial institutions. Dr. Khademhosseini's research efforts have earned him the Technology Review Magazine "Top Young Innovator" (TR35) award (2007), the BMW Group Scientific Award (2007), the ACS Victor K. LaMer Award (2008), the Coulter Foundation Early Career Award (2006) and the IEEE-EMBS Early Career award (2008). Khademhosseini's teaching efforts were recognized as MIT's Outstanding Undergraduate mentor (2004). He received his Ph.D. in bioengineering from MIT (2005), and MASc (2001) and BASc (1999) degrees from University of Toronto both in chemical engineering.