Quinton Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California Irvine. He launched his lab in April 2021, after completing his postdoctoral research in liver tissue engineering, under the mentorship of Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before his postdoctoral research, Dr. Smith received his Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Johns Hopkins University. There, he worked under the supervision of Dr. Sharon Gerecht, developing engineering strategies to study how physical stimuli tune vascular specification from human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs). His current research focuses on fabricating vascularized liver tissues from hiPSCs. Additionally, his group focuses on generating stem cell derived gastruloids, which represent self-organized structures that take on features of early embryonic development. Dr. Smith is a Siebel Scholar, Keystone Symposium Fellow, and is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Hanna Gray Fellowship.