Laura Rijns

Laura Rijns studied Biomedical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). As an undergraduate student, she was the Lab Captain of the international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) TU/e 2016 team, focused on regulatable scaffold proteins. After obtaining her Bachelor of Science in 2017, she did a summer internship at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) in the lab of prof. Songi Han in biophysics on liquid-liquid phase-separated coacervate polymers for wet adhesion applications. In 2019, she graduated within the group of prof. E.W. (Bert) Meijer on the synthesis and characterization of charged supramolecular polymers. During her Master of Science, she did an internship at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) with prof. Maartje Bastings, studying multivalent interactions using DNA.  

In October 2019, she started a PhD project at TU/e in Biomedical Engineering under guidance of prof. Patricia Dankers and prof. E.W. (Bert) Meijer. Supramolecular hydrogels as mimics of the extracellular matrix (ECM) were developed with dynamic control over their mechanic and bioactive properties. Based on the most important findings, guidelines are proposed that control supramolecular hydrogel-cell interactions. During her PhD, she was awarded the Materials Driven Regeneration (MDR) Young Talent 2021 award, allowing her to return to the lab of prof. Maartje Bastings at EPFL to engineer control over ligand presentation in supramolecular hydrogels using DNA.

Laura Rijns was awarded a Niels Stensen Fellowship in 2023, supporting the next step in her career to become a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. The aim of this research is to improve the communication between electronic materials and living tissue, potentially allowing to repair diseased neuronal tissue (e.g. Alzheimer’s), electrically.