To my Readers:

I attended the BMES (Biomedical Engineering Society) Fall Meeting from September 26th until the 29th. Last year the conference was held in Chicago, this year it was in Hollywood. The theme of this year’s conference was “Engineering the Future of Biology and Medicine”. The Biomedical Engineering Department at UC Irvine compensated the entire George Lab (and myself) for the conference this year!

It was an amazing experience! Anyone who has the opportunity to attend next year definitely should. There are several tracks from which one can chose their area of interest, for example respiratory engineering, biomaterials and tissue engineering, cardiovascular engineering, and a few more. For each track, there are several talks scheduled and many posters presented at the conference.

I met many prestigious people, learned how to improve my own experiments, and discovered several break-throughs in the field of biomedical engineering. My attendance at this conference benefits all you readers as well because I have quite a few interesting articles lined up. From tissue engineering to industry to biocompatibility of heart devices to interesting people…keep up with www.AmyShah.com this week for all the exciting first-hand stories.

I would like to apologize for being absent for so long and being extremely inconsistent with my posts. I want to thank all of my loyal readers for consistently visiting my site during this “dry spell” of articles. For all of my readers, I have a new look for my website, courtesy of Joey Dehnert at Blockbot Webdesign. I would also like to thank the wonderful folks at Single Grain for consistently optimizing my website to bring readers like you to AmyShah.com. I hope this new website is easier to navigate through and more appealing to the eye, if you have any complaints, suggestions, or comments about it, please contact me.

I have been away from my website conducting tissue engineering research in Dr. Steven George’s lab at UC Irvine. I am working with fibrin gels and three types of human cells to create a three-dimensional matrix and grow capillaries. My work has been stemming off the work from this publication in which the three-dimensional model that I am optimizing was designed. The three different types of cells that I am using are Normal Human Lung Fibroblasts (NHLF), Human Umbilical Vein Endothelial Cells (HUVEC), and Normal Human Bronchial Epithelial cells (NHBE). The capillaries sprout from HUVECs grown on beads in a fibrin gel with NHLFs. The NHBEs are only utilized when I am ready to compress the model to induce an asthma attack on the tissues. If you have any questions feel free to contact me. I hope you will enjoy the new and improved AmyShah.com. Thank you.

-Amy