(2fy) Engineering Tissue Physicochemical Properties for Multi-Omic Characterization

The investigation of the structural and molecular profiles of biological tissues is of great interest in the field of neuroscience, medicine, and biology. In case of the brain physiology, direct probing of human brain tissues is crucial in understanding organ functions and dysfunctions. However, there are two main challenges: tissue scarcity and quality. As the human brain tissues consist of a large number of cells with discrete expressional and functional profiles, the comprehensive understanding of the brain requires extensive downstream characterization and analysis of multiple samples to fully capture biological information with minimal loss. To address these challenges, various alternative animal models and stem cell-derived models were proposed. Yet, both alternative and direct study of biological tissues require the engineering of tissue physicochemical properties that can facilitate the study of biological samples at their healthy and diseased states through effective preservation of biological information.

Research Interests

My research interests are in applying chemical engineering principles to biotechnology fields to characterize biological tissues. My doctoral research focused on two main areas: 1) developing and applying hydrogel-based tissue clearing technologies to visualize organ-scale biological tissues at cellular and subcellular level, and 2) generating alternative brain models using human stem cell derived cerebral organoids. I have extensive research experience in culturing and differentiating stem cells, generating 3-dimensional cerebral organoids, and using novel hydrogel-based tissue clearing technology to form tissue-gel hybrid using various tissues (human postmortem tissues, mouse brain, cerebral organoids), which can be used for multi-omic characterization of the biological tissues with high flexibility and scalability.

Currently, the technologies suffer from low scalability and throughput due to various factors such as lengthy processing time and lack of methods to scale-up. To address these challenges, I believe that chemical engineering principles can be applied to biological tissues to enable scale-up and increased throughput. My goal is (i) to model tissue-hydrogel reaction to better design reaction parameters, (ii) to design a multiplexing method to improve throughput in visualizing molecular profiles, and (iii) to apply these technologies to connect molecular profiles to biological function and dysfunction. I envision that with this approach, we can characterize biological tissues in a more systematic way with higher scalability and throughput.