ORS Open Door 2020

As we age, our tissues and organs experience injuries, disease, and degeneration that can significantly impact our quality of life. A large number of these tissues are unable to completely heal on their own, which can lead to the implantation of a medical device or cadaver tissue to replace the damaged tissue. In this talk, I will discuss the emerging field of regenerative medicine and how engineers are designing new materials that can direct cells to regrow new tissues and organs.

Julianne Holloway, PhD

Julianne L. Holloway is currently an assistant professor in chemical engineering at Arizona State University, where she began in 2016. Holloway received her doctorate in chemical engineering at Drexel University in 2012. Her postdoctoral research was performed with Professor Jason Burdick in the Bioengineering Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Through her research on engineering hydrogels for synergistic biomolecule delivery, she was awarded the National Institutes of Health Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Postdoctoral (NIH NRSA F32) Fellowship. Her research interests are in the field of tissue engineering, with a focus on designing materials to mimic the native biochemical and biophysical cues of musculoskeletal tissues.

Holloway’s research has been recognized through several awards, including: University of Washington’s Distinguished Young Scholars Seminar Participant (2014); Most Promising Graduate Student Commencement Award (Drexel University, 2012); National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (2009-2012); and First Place in the Society for Advancement of Material and Process Engineering University Research Symposium (2010). Holloway is also committed to service and teaching, where she was serves on the editorial board of Regenerative Biomaterials, as an associate scientific advisor for Science Translational Medicine, and as the chair for the Society for Biomaterials’ Young Scientists Group.

The anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) of the knee is commonly injured, particularly in  young athletes.  The current treatment involves removing the torn ligament and replacing it with a tendon taken from somewhere else in the leg.  This is called an “ACL reconstruction”.  For the past 30 years, Dr Murray and her team have worked on finding a way to get the torn ends to heal successfully so that that a patient’s ACL could be restored, rather than replaced.  In this talk, she will outline that history and the results of that project to date.

Martha Murray, MD

Martha Murray, MD, is a Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at Harvard Medical School.  She has developed a novel technique of Bridge-Enhanced™ ACL repair which utilizes a bio-engineered scaffold to stimulate healing of the ligament instead of the traditional harvesting of a graft of tendon to replace the torn ACL and translated it from the lab to the operating room with grant funding from various sources, including the NIH and NFL Players association.  She has founded a company, MIACH Orthopaedics, to manufacture the scaffold.  She has 9 issued patents and over 100 peer-reviewed publications around the development of this technology, including the most cited article in the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine.  She has won the AAOS Kappa Delta Award, been named one of Fast Company’s Top 100 Most Creative People in Business, been featured in Stephen Hawking’s Brave New World Series and been featured in a video on Tech Insider that garnered over 65 million views on Facebook.  Martha has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Delaware, a MS in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford, and received her MD from the University of Pennsylvania prior to completing residencies and fellowships at Harvard Medical School.

Tyler Distefano, PhD Candidate

ORS Spine Section
Spine Bioengineering Lab
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Jeffery Nielsen, PhD Candidate

ORS International Section of Fracture Repair (ISFR)
College of Pharmacy
Purdue University