Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/06/2016
4:00 pm
Location
MAE-A 303
Categories No Categories
Dr. Beth Pruitt, Ph.D.
Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University
Biography:
Dr. Beth Pruitt is from Massachusetts and received the S.B. in M.E. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She was in Navy ROTC at MIT where she learned sailing, leadership, and perseverance and later served as an officer in the US Navy. She received an M.S. in Manufacturing Systems Engineering from Stanford University then served as an officer in the U.S. Navy, first at the engineering headquarters of the nuclear program then as an instructor teaching Systems Engineering and offshore sailing at the U.S. Naval Academy. She earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University where she specialized in MEMS and small-scale metrologies for electrical contacts. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) where she worked on polymer MEMS. She joined the Mechanical Engineering faculty of Stanford in Fall 2003 and started the Stanford Microsystems Lab focused on developing small-scale metrologies for interdisciplinary micro mechanics problems. The Lab is especially interested in understanding the mechanobiology and biomechanics of cells. She was also a visiting professor in the Lab for Applied Mechanobiology in the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at ETH, Zurich in 2012.
Abstract:
Living organisms generate and respond to mechanical forces and these forces are sensed and created by specialized cells in the body. Force generation and sensing, or more broadly the mechanobiology coupling tissue (cell) mechanics and biology, are essential in normal development, wound healing, and tissue homeostasis. Our mechanical senses of hearing and touch allow us to navigate our environment and interact with one another, yet they remain the least understood of our perceptive senses. Basic life sustaining functions such as breathing, circulation, and digestion are driven autonomously by coordinated contraction of specialized muscle cells, yet how these functions incorporate active feedback via force sensing at the cellular level is an area of active study. Meanwhile, a variety of specialized stretch activated receptors and mechanically mediated biochemical signaling pathways have been identified in recent years. Importantly, defects in proteins of these mechanically mediated pathways and receptors have been implicated in disease states spanning cardiovascular disease, cancer growth and metastasis, neuropathy, and deafness. Thus, understanding the mechanical basis of homeostasis (health) and defective cell renewal function (disease) increasingly requires us to consider the role of mechanics. To study how cells and tissues integrate mechanical signals, we and others have developed specialized cell cultures systems and micromachined tools to stimulate and measure forces and displacements at the scale of proteins and cells. A key feature of such experiments is the ability to observe cell outputs such as morphological changes, protein expression, electrophysiological signaling, force generation and transcriptional activity in response to mechanical stimuli.