A Worcester Polytechnic Institute professor is headed to Ireland for a year to study nanoscale tissue engineering, thanks to a federal Fulbright Scholarship.
Kristen Billiar, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at WPI, is the 14th faculty member to land the award and the school’s first in the life sciences. He’ll spend the 2009-2010 academic year at the National University of Ireland, Galway, working with that school’s Abhay Pandit on the study of the mechanics of nanoscale scaffolds for tissue engineering.
{IMAGELEFT:http://www.massdevice.com/sites/default/wp-content/uploads/headshots/Billiar_Kristen_100x100.jpg}Billiar, who joined the WPI faculty in 2002 after earning a PhD in bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, also worked at Organogenesis Inc. as a staff engineer. He studies how the mechanical forces of tissue stretching and cell contraction affect the growth and healing of soft tissue, with an eye toward helping engineered skin, heart valves and other tissues behave more naturally and heal without scarring.