Institute for Stem Cell & Regenerative Medicine

ISCRM's Deok-Ho Kim, Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at University of Washington, has been named a 2015 Young Innovator of Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering (CMBE) by the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES).

Dr. Kim is one of only 11 distinguished honorees this year who are tenure-track assistant professors working in the field of cellular and molecular bioengineering. This years honorees represent some of the best and brightest working in the field and were chosen from a highly competitive pool of candidates, noted a CMBE official.

As part of the selection process, they were invited to submit full-length manuscripts that underwent a rigorous peer-review process prior to publication in the most recent issue of the scientific journalCellular and Molecular Bioengineering.

Dr. Kim was recognized for the development of a nanopatterned human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived model of a dystrophin-null cardiomyopathic phenotype. His research group has demonstrated the utility of bio-inspired nanotopographically-defined materials for controlling the structural and functional properties of hiPSC-derived cardiomyocytes, providing an enabling platform for effectively stratifying normal and structural cardiac disease phenotypes in vitro. This work was performed in collaboration with Dr. David Mack and Dr. Martin Childers in the Institute of Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine at the University of Washington. Their findings are published in the September issue ofCMBE Journal.

Advanced heart cell-based systems such as these offer unprecedented opportunities to study a wide range of heart diseases in more rigorous and innovative ways; paving the way for breakthroughs in treatment options and someday cures for patients where none exist today, said Jesse Macadangdang, lead author of the paper and graduate student in Kims laboratory.

Dr. Kim, who joined University of Washington in 2011, received his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins University, where he was most recently an assistant research professor. Earlier in his career, Dr. Kim worked at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich (ETH Zrich) and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology as a Research Scientist. His research spans diverse fields, including nanobiomaterials, mechanobiology, stem cell and tissue engineering, and micro/nanofabrication of polymeric biomaterials.

For more information on Dr. Kims research,visithttp://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12195-015-0413-8.

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Institute for Stem Cell & Regenerative Medicine