Speaker
Description
Hydrogels are water-swollen polymer networks that have gained great interest in the field of medicine. While hydrogels are often used as uniform isotropic materials, their processing to include microstructural cues (e.g., porosity, patterning) can further enhance their use. I will provide several recent examples where we have developed methods to introduce microstructure into hydrogels. As one approach, we engineer granular hydrogels through the jamming of hydrogel microparticles, where structure can be altered through the incorporation of anisotropic particles or through the inclusion of cell aggregates. These materials are useful for either endogenous tissue repair (e.g., myocardial infarction) or for tissue engineering (e.g., cartilage). As another approach, hydrogels are processed with lithography-based (i.e., digital light processing, DLP) 3D printing to introduce microstructure. We have been advancing the development of new DLP resins (e.g., responsive nanodomains), as well as DLP-printing techniques (e.g., incorporating chain entanglement) to improve material toughness and fatigue resistance. Such tough hydrogels are being explored as scaffolds for tissue engineering or as tough biomedical adhesives.
