Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a devastating injury, which can be caused by motor vehicle accidents, violence, and non-traumatic causes. These injuries can leave patients with lifelong paralysis, as well as incontinence and life threatening autonomic dysreflexia. There is currently no FDA approved treatment for SCI. Spinal injury disrupts the...
Developing materials with comparable structural complexity and programmed hierarchy as those found in nature is a grand challenge in materials science. One way to synthesize soft materials with these complex architectures is to use bottom-up self-assembly of nanoscale building blocks, mimicking how organisms grow tissues with specific functions from peptides,...
The three studies in this project investigate a selected number of youth protective factors and caregiver parenting skills with reducing the risk of justice involvement for youth involved in the child welfare system without a prior history of justice involvement. All three studies used child welfare administrative data, and the...
Built from non-covalent interactions, supramolecular biomaterials are highly dynamic and tunable, and recent work has shown that they are uniquely capable of mimicking functional biological structures. In this work, supramolecular biomaterials built from self-assembling peptide amphiphiles (PA) were investigated with the goal of precisely tuning their cohesive interactions to optimize...
Intestinal immunity is a critical contributor to host health. The immune system in the intestine maintains both defense against pathogens and homeostasis of intestinal tissue, which is exposed to environmental influences, including microbes and ingested foods. Proper regulation of the immune response is required to prevent damage to the host....
When attached to another species (e.g. a nanoparticle), the sequence specificity of DNA can be repurposed to program interactions between such entities and to direct their formation into ordered structures. The research presented in this thesis aims to push the boundaries of structures that can be made via this approach....