Cole DeForest

Our team seeks to integrate the governing principles of rational design with fundamental concepts from material science, synthetic chemistry, and stem cell biology to conceptualize, create, and exploit next-generation materials to address a variety of health-related problems.  We are currently interested in the development of user-programmable biomaterials for assaying dynamic stem cell fate and tissue engineering applications, controlled therapeutic delivery to combat disease, and new tools for enhanced proteomic studies.  Our work relies heavily on the utilization of cytocompatible bioorthogonal chemistries, several of which can be initiated with light, to control material properties on the molecular level.