Cole DeForest
University of Washington, WA·Biomedical Engineering
Tissues are not static. They change shape during development, repair themselves, and go wrong in disease — and the signals driving those changes vary both over time and across three-dimensional space, what this work calls 4D.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Chemistry
Biophysics
- Topics
biomaterials
hydrogels
4D cell culture
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2031
What they work on
- Establish chemical strategies that set a biomaterial's mechanical stiffness and its biochemical cues independently, each with 4D grayscale control, so cells can be exposed to either variable alone.
- Engineer tissues containing multiple cell types by patterning synNotch-mediated differentiation and transdifferentiation in 4D, using the engineered receptor that makes cells switch on chosen genes upon contact with specified neighbors.
- Develop next-generation optogenetic methods that directly and tracelessly photoactivate any protein species, in solution, throughout biomaterials and inside living cells, extending the Light-Activated SpyLigation approach.
- Pioneer modular biosynthetic routes to proteins with defined molecular topology, enabling multiplexed delivery of several species, Boolean logic-based material degradation, and disease fingerprinting.
More about the research
Standard lab dishes and gels cannot reproduce that: they present cells with one fixed, uniform environment. This program builds chemistry that lets researchers write, rewrite and read biological instructions inside synthetic tissues with light, at the scale of a single cell or smaller.
Why it matters
Tools that recreate how signals change over time and space in real tissue give researchers a way to study cell behavior that flat, static cultures miss. Materials that degrade only when a programmed set of disease markers is present could become the basis for diagnostics or triggered drug release, and light-controlled tissue engineering could inform how damaged tissue is repaired, though these applications remain to be demonstrated.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Teresa Rapp
University of Oregon, OR·Chemistry
Develop photocleavable crosslinkers based on ruthenium polypyridyl complexes, light-sensitive metal compounds, that work across many different biomaterial supports.
Vivek Shenoy
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Biomedical Engineering
Characterize and engineer proteins and nanostructures that respond to piconewton forces and nanometer displacements, to build mechano-biological reagents and materials.
Michael Blatchley
Syracuse University, NY·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Test how light-triggered softening or stiffening of a PEG hydrogel matrix changes the cell-type makeup and maturation of iPSC-derived intestinal epithelial organoids over time.
The school
University of Washington: 81 labs on PI Pages, $1.7B a year on research, 694 research doctorates a year.
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