Congratulations to Shreedevi Kumar, Ph.D. candidate, who was a recipient of the Tau Beta Pi Fellowship award.

Kumar conducts research in the Sharma Laboratory and focuses on the use of biomaterial properties and cell-material interactions for drug delivery of therapeutics that are being translated into in vivo mechanistic studies and therapeutic evaluation. Specifically, she conducts research on drug delivery vehicles and therapeutics that are site-specific and targeted at different inflammatory pathways in osteoarthritis (OA). She is developing a nanotherapeutic that targets oxidative stress mechanisms in the cartilage and synovium of the OA joint in one of her projects and a microparticle drug delivery system that targets macrophages and delivers a therapeutic that would polarize them from a pro-inflammatory to an anti-inflammatory state in the OA joint in her other project. Given the chronic loop of self-perpetuating tissue damage and macrophage activation that occurs in OA joints, these anti-inflammatory strategies could mitigate some of these manifestations and lead to both chondroprotection and modulation of inflammation.

The Fellowship Program is Tau Beta Pi’s single most important project for the advancement of engineering education and the profession. It is a time-proven idea that was pioneered by Tau Beta Pi in the honor-society field. Since the beginning, the purpose has been to finance, for a select group of members chosen for merit, a year of graduate study at the institutions of their choice.