Elaine Nagahara is a rising senior at Johns Hopkins University majoring in materials science and engineering with a concentration in biomaterials. In Dr. Luo Gu’s Lab at Johns Hopkins, she tunes material properties such as stiffness and viscoelasticity in alginate hydrogels to study their effects on cell behavior. At UCLA, Elaine is translating her research background to investigating how changes in biomaterial properties affect the response of immune cells. While biomaterials have a large variety of healthcare applications, their success depends on how the immune system reacts to them. Once biomaterials enter the body, they interact with a myriad of molecular signals and different immune cell types via their material properties that modify the local microenvironment. This summer, Elaine is specifically studying how the presence of cell-adhesion peptides and the type of crosslinker used in hydrogel microporous annealed particle (MAP) scaffolds affect the response of antigen-presenting immune cells. MAP scaffolds are a novel class of injectable biomaterials that support the regeneration of damaged tissue by facilitating host cells to infiltrate and form healthy complex tissue networks. She will create the MAP scaffolds with different conditions via microfluidics before seeding them with macrophages and dendritic cells. She will quantify their response by measuring the amount of scaffold uptake with fluorescence microscopy. These findings are important in creating an immunomodulatory platform that can target specific immune responses to advance tissue regeneration and other future applications such as vaccine development. Elaine would like to thank the Di Carlo Lab for enriching and supporting her research interests, and the Amgen Foundation for funding this opportunity