Stephanie Seidlits, a Texas BME alum and Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) Rising Star, will join the Department of Biomedical Engineering as an associate professor in January 2022.
Seidlits is currently an assistant professor in bioengineering at UCLA. Her research seeks to develop clinical therapies for central nervous system injury and disorder, including spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, and glioma formation. Her approaches combine biomaterial microenvironments and advanced imaging tools to identify differences between the extracellular environment of diseased and healthy or developing and adult central nervous system tissues and exploit the mechanistic discoveries to create novel therapies that target the local environment. Seidlits’ long-term research goal is to translate biomaterial microenvironments to in vivo therapies using hydrogels, gene and protein delivery and cell replacement as building blocks.
Indicative of her promising research, Seidlits is the recipient of numerous awards, including most recently a $4 million Recruitment of Rising Star Award from CPRIT. CPRIT’s mission is to attract top cancer research scientists to Texas. The CPRIT funding will allow Seidlits to continue research into development of biomaterial platforms to study tumor invasion and biomaterial microarrays for personalized cancer treatment.
She has also received the UCLA Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award, the Biomedical Engineering Society Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Rising Star Award, an NSF Early Faculty Career Development Award.
Seidlits serves as an ad hoc grant reviewer for the NIH, NSF, Dunhill Medical Trust, Medical Research Council, and Meghan Rose Bradley Foundation. She is a member of many professional organizations, including the American Association of Cancer Research, the Society for Neuro-Oncology, and the Society for Biomaterials.
She trained as an NIH NRSA F32 postdoctoral fellow in chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University, and she received her Ph.D. and M.S.E. degrees in biomedical engineering from UT Austin, and a B.S.E. in bioengineering from Rice University.
