PhD Candidate
Harvard-MIT Health Science and Technology, Massachusetts, United States
Louis DeRidder is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard Medical School and MIT, where he studies Medical Engineering and Medical Physics in their joint Health Sciences and Technology program. For his thesis, he is working with Profs. Robert Langer and Giovanni Traverso to develop a medical device to personalize the delivery of chemotherapeutics to patients (the topic of this present talk), and on another project to improve the delivery of nucleic-acid therapies to non-liver tissues. Previously, he completed his B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where he concieved of and led a project in the Kannan Lab to develop a novel dendrimer-drug conjugate to manipulating microglia from a pro-inflammatory to an anti-inflammatory phenotype for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Louis plans to become a Professor in Biological, Chemical or Biomedical Engineering, where he will develop technologies to treat and study neurological diseases, with the goal of bringing innovative devices and therapies to patients, which likely will entail launching startup biotechnology companies to develop the technology towards clinical translation.
Thursday, October 12, 2023
8:45 AM – 9:00 AM PDT