Graduate Assistant
Virginia Commonwealth University
I am Tristan Strayer, a Ph.D. student in Virginia Commonwealth University's pharmaceutical engineering program. This is the first program of its kind in the United States. I received my undergraduate degree in chemical engineering with a focus in biological engineering and a minor in biomedical engineering from Colorado School of Mines in 2022. I am currently working in the Puetzer lab, which works in engineering functional replacements to injured connective tissues such as the meniscus and ACL. My work is in studying cell mechanosensing mechanisms such as focal adhesions and various ion channels, and what affect they have on the level of hierarchical collagen organization. We use high-density collagen scaffolds to observe the effects of the inhibition of these various cell sensing mechanisms and investigate the nature of the ability of fibroblasts to hierarchically organize collagen.