Chris Clark is a Grad Slam Finalist!
Grad Slam is an experience highlighting 10 of UCI’s top graduate researchers, as they pitch their impressive research and its importance, live, in a competition setting – in just 3 minutes. Chris presented his work on The Mechanics of Early Organ Development
“Stem cell differentiation has been a well-studied and essential aspect of cellular biology over the last several decades; however, while significant advancements have been made in the study of soluble cues, not all effects of the mechanical environment in and outside of the cell have been thoroughly investigated at this point. In specific, the stem-to-endoderm and endoderm-to-hepatocyte cell transitions have not been studied for their mechanical dependencies. This work focuses on understanding the systems by which stem cells differentiate optimally by mimicking the natural cellular niche.”
