Richelle Thomas

Hyaluronic Acid Materials

Chemical Engineering
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712
BME 4.410
Phone: (512) 471-1986
E-mail: richelle@che.utexas.edu

Year Joined Lab: 2008

Education, Training and Memberships

BS Chemical Engineering, University of Notre Dame (2008)

Research

The overall goal of tissue engineering is to develop biologically relevant and structurally mimetic scaffolds that can be incorporated into the body to aid in the regeneration and/or revascularization process. Native tissues have extensive porous networks that allow appropriate throughput of blood, oxygen and nutrients. To this end, I work to create three-dimensional scaffolds that, once reorganized in vivo, will restore these properties in the affected tissue. I implement a variety of methods to accomplish this task, each boasting attributes germane to the field. The most simple of the techniques requires precipitating a thermally dissolved super-saturated salt solution in a hydrogel matrix at room temperature. The spontaneously nucleating crystals push the hydrogel into the interstitial spaces, leaving a highly porous three-dimensional polymer scaffold. The properties of this matrix may be tuned by varying the salt concentration and volume of salt solution relative to polymer. We have employed the natural polymer hyaluronic acid as the primary scaffold in this technique.