This talk will be held in person in Glandt Forum; snacks will be served.

Regenerative medicine is an interdisciplinary field that has significant promise for treating compromised tissues and organs. In our laboratory, we use a number of tools including biomaterials, organoids, quantitative modeling, and animal models to gain new fundamental understandings and identify therapeutic targets. In this talk, I will show several examples from our lab illustrating the use of such platforms to address key problems in tissue repair with aging and disease progression. First, I will discuss our efforts in creating synthetic analogs of the extracellular matrix to direct stem cell commitment in vitro and in vivo with a focus on bone tissue repair and employing such platforms to understand molecular mechanisms underlying bone homeostasis and identifying new therapeutic targets (Shih et al., PNAS 111: 990, 2014; 114: 5419 2017; Kang H et al., Biomacromolecules 16: 1050, 2015; Shih et al., Sci. Adv. 5: eaax1387, 2019). Next, I will discuss how these understandings can be leveraged to develop therapeutic interventions to promote tissue repair and mitigate pain (Zeng et al., Adv. Mater. 32, 2020). Finally, I will end the talk by discussing our ongoing efforts in studying the effect of aging on neuroinflammation.