All the hard work finally paid off.
For biomedical engineering students Sarah Stabenfeldt and Patricia Arauz, nine months of intense lab research culminated at the Materials Research Society’s (MRS) spring meeting in San Francisco.
Stabenfeldt, a senior, and Arauz, a junior, presented their findings and conclusions from their lab projects at the MRS convention. The two students created posters that illustrated their findings and showed the processes that were used to gather data.
Stabenfeldt’s poster, titled Guidance Channel Development: Controlled Release Of NGF From PLGA Scaffolds won the Best Poster award in the open competition for people involved with biomedical engineering. The award placed Stabefeldt’s poster above all others, including those created by graduate students, professors and companies trying to promote their own research.
Stabenfeldt’s research project focused on improving nerve regeneration in paralyzed areas of the body.
The current theory for nerve regeneration is to create a biodegradable tube that is implanted inside the body and the nerves subsequently re-grow together through the tube.
“With that idea in place, I wanted to look at a way to enhance the nerve growth. So I wanted to incorporate some kind of extra stimulus that will help the nerves grow. I wanted to control the release of a certain growth factor that could be released as the tube degrades over time, which would then enhance the nerve growth,” said Stabenfeldt.
Arauz’s research dealt with studying the characteristics of hydrogels, so as to develop processes by which they can be used in orthopedic applications. A hydrogel is described as a water-swollen, cross-linked polymeric structure, or, in English, a contact lens.
Arauz’s research is titled: Influence of Hydrogel Structure on Osteoblast Function. Her research was a study of how the possible implementation of hydrogels would affect bone-cell regeneration inside the human body.
Stabenfeldt and Arauz’s projects will be continued in the biomedical engineering labs by future students who will pick up the research where it has been left off.
Overseeing their research is Dr. Rebecca Kuntz-Willits, a professor in the biomedical engineering department.
While she serves as an advisor to the students, Willits explained that both Stabenfeldt and Arauz were on their own in doing their research.
“Sarah went out and researched what we were talking about, which was nerve-guidance channels, then we talked about the different things that she could do with it and then she found something that she liked and chose to do that,” said Willits.
For Stabenfeldt, it was the last project that she will undertake at Saint Louis University. She has decided to continue her education in graduate school at Georgia Tech University.
Stabenfeldt, a St. Louis native, was forced to choose a university different than her current alma mater because Saint Louis University is just one of two schools in the nation that has an undergraduate biomedical engineering program but no graduate program.
Current students don’t have the option of staying at SLU for their post-graduate biomedical engineering education. SLU’s biomedical engineering program, which was developed in 1997, still has no graduate-level program.
The other school with an undergraduate program and no graduate level program is Cincinnati, whose undergraduate program was founded just last year.
