BME Seminar: “Biomodulatory Materials”

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Bret Ulery, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Chemical & Biomedical Engineering
University of Missouri

Abstract: As the medical engineering community tackles grand challenges like intracellular drug delivery and complex tissue regeneration, strategies employing inert biomaterials passively delivering singular pharmaceutical payloads have been found to be sub-optimal. Instead novel, multi-dimensional strategies need to be developed in order to achieve the next series of biomedical breakthroughs. One emerging strategy is the exploitation of the physicochemical properties of biomaterials to directly modulate cellular and host responses giving rise to a unique sub-class of biomaterials termed biomodulatory materials. In this seminar, research designing and utilizing biomodulatory materials for regenerative medicine and immunological applications will be discussed.

Bio: Bret Ulery is the Principal Investigator of the Biomodulatory Materials Engineering Laboratory, the Founding Director of Materials Science & Engineering Graduate Studies, and an Associate Professor of Chemical & Biomedical Engineering at the University of Missouri. After earning a B.S.E. in Chemical Engineering and a B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Iowa in 2006, he conducted graduate research with Dr. Balaji Narasimhan at Iowa State University and received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering with a Graduate Minor in Immunobiology in 2010. Following completion of his doctoral studies, he spent four years as a postdoctoral researcher first working in Dr. Cato Laurencin’s research group at the Institute for Regenerative Engineering at the University of Connecticut Health Center and then in Dr. Matt Tirrell’s group at the Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago.