Erika Moore, Ph.D., holder of the Rhines Rising Star Larry Hench Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering, has received the prestigious National Institutes of Health Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. Dr. Moore and her team will use the five-year, $1.85 million award to address critical gaps in understanding the relationship between ancestry and cell responses in wound healing. In the long term, this research will lead to biomaterial models of health disparities for the improved identification of wound healing risks and outcomes.