Natalie Boehnke Receives NSF CAREER Award
Assistant Professor Natalie Boehnke has been awarded the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) CAREER Award, a highly prestigious honor for early-career faculty who demonstrate the potential to be academic role models in research and education. The award supports her proposal titled "Barcoded Hydrogels: A Multifunctional Platform for Biomaterials Discovery and Development." This proposal is aimed at advancing the development and testing of hydrogels for medical and environmental applications.
Hydrogels are squishy, sponge-like materials with significant potential in medicine and environmental science. Hydrogels are used for wound healing, drug delivery in the body, and even to clean up pollution. Made from long chains of molecules called polymers, hydrogels hold large amounts of water and change shape or function depending on their design. However, designing the most effective hydrogels for specific applications is a complex challenge. Traditional testing methods are slow and expensive, making it difficult for researchers to quickly and efficiently identify the best hydrogels. This prevents effective hydrogel materials from being developed for many critical applications.
This proposal aims to leverage two innovative techniques, barcoding and pooled screening, to accelerate the testing and development of hydrogels. Professor Boehnke and her research group will barcode individual hydrogel materials with unique identifiers, like product barcodes in a store. These barcodes are chemical markers that can be used to track and distinguish hydrogels. Instead of testing each hydrogel separately, barcoded hydrogels can be grouped, or pooled, together and exposed to the same test conditions, saving time and resources and lowering experimental variability. The barcodes make it possible to track the performance of each hydrogel individually. This proposed method will provide a way to test up to hundreds or thousands of hydrogel designs in parallel, enabling rapid evaluation and comparison of hydrogel performance. This approach aims to speed up the discovery of improved, functional hydrogels.
This project will also give students the opportunity to learn more about hydrogels and biomaterials and their applications.
Congratulations to Professor Boehnke on this well-deserved recognition! To learn more about Professor Boehnke’s work, please visit her research group page.