For the BBI's May seminar, we will be joined by Dr Ravinash Krishna Kumar (Queen Mary University of London) and Dr James Armstrong (University of Bristol).  

Abstracts

Dr Ravinash Krishna Kumar: 3D Printing Synthetic Tissues and Microbial Communities
Networks of water-in-oil droplets, connected by interface bilayers, have become a powerful tool to study lipid bilayers and membrane proteins in real-time. By using a 3D printer to pattern these droplet interface bilayers, we show these systems can also be used to 1) replicate tissue properties and be used to interact collectively with microbes; and 2) be used to pattern microbial cells to understand how the structure of a microbial community determines its fate.

Dr James Armstrong: Controlling the Assembly of Biomaterials and Engineered Tissues
James' research is focused on developing new bioengineering technologies that can provide control over the assembly of biomaterials and tissues. He will first describe a new multimaterial 3D bioprinting method for generating vascularized networks with complex 3D morphology (Advanced Functional Materials 2020). He will next describe recent advances in using ultrasound standing waves to rapidly and remotely pattern living cells into tuneable geometric arrays. He will explore how this can be used to fabricate biomaterials patterned with cells that can then be engineered into anisotropic tissues, such as skeletal muscle, cartilage, and cardiac tissue (e.g., Advanced Materials 2018, Advanced Healthcare Materials 2022). He will conclude this talk with another acoustic technology: the use of ultrasound to trigger molecular processes, such as enzyme catalysis and enzymatic hydrogelation (Advanced Materials 2020). He will explore the design of this modular system and discuss how ultrasound has a unique set of properties that opens new biomedical opportunities.

Biographies

Dr Ravinash Krishna Kumar is a Lecturer in Medical Technology in the School of Engineering and Materials Science at Queen Mary University of London and a Visiting Academic at the University of Oxford. He has just been awarded an EPSRC Open Plus Fellowship to develop new technologies for building experimental gut microbiome models. For his MSci in Chemistry at the University of Bristol (2005-2009), he spent one year in industry at DuPont (USA) working on second generation biofuels. He then pursued a PhD at the University of Bristol and worked with Professor Stephen Mann (2009-2014), where he designed and built artificial cells for understanding the role of the eukaryotic cytoskeleton. Ravinash moved to the University of Oxford for postdoctoral work on lipid bilayer biophysics and TIRF microscopy with Professor Mark Wallace (2014-2015). Towards the end of his first postdoc, he became fascinated with microbial communities and sought to train in microbiology and microbial ecology. This is when he began his work on 3D printing methods for microbiology and synthetic biology projects with Professor Hagan Bayley and Professor Kevin Foster at the University of Oxford: between 2016 and 2022, he developed new 3D printing approaches to 1) generate patterned bacterial communities to understand structure/function relationships, and 2) construct micron-sized patterned compartments to control cellular behaviour. He also took parental leave for six months before joining QMUL in September 2022 and starting a research group.

Dr James Armstrong leads a research group in Translational Health Sciences based in Bristol Medical School at the University of Bristol. Since graduating from his PhD in 2015, he has been supported by three personal Fellowship awards: Arthritis Research UK (2015-2018), the Medical Research Council (2018-2021), and now a prestigious UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (2021-2028). These major funding awards have enabled him to lead a programme of highly interdisciplinary and collaborative research focussed on using biomaterials, nanomaterials, and remote fields to engineer artificial tissues with structural and functional complexity. He is now expanding his research interests into organoids and organ-on-chip systems while also seeking to translate his technologies for applied biological modelling and regenerative medicine.