Abstract

Dr. Simon earned a B.S. in Biology from Bucknell University in 1992 and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from University of Virginia in 1999. He studied signal transduction during human platelet aggregation for his thesis. He did a post-doctoral fellowship in the Polymers Division at the NIST and became a staff scientist at NIST in 2003. He currently leads a project entitled “3D Tissue Scaffolds” and his research is focused on developing methods for characterizing cell-material interactions. He has developed combinatorial methods for screening cell-material interactions where the material is presented to the cell in a 3D format. Much previous work has centered on using 2D material surfaces for screening cell response to materials yet cells exist in a 3D matrix in vivo, cells in vitro behave more physiologically when cultured in 3D and biomaterials are commonly used in a 3D scaffold format for tissue engineering applications. Thus, Dr. Simons group has developed several platforms for fabricating combinatorial libraries of polymer scaffolds with varied material properties. These scaffold libraries can be used to screen material property phase space to identify scaffold designs that optimize tissue generation.