News

The Lake lab challenged all of our colleagues and their labs to donate any excess PPE during lab shut down to help with the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a tweet the challenge was passed on and accepted by various other groups across many universities. Check out the nice blog post written by BMES. Link here

The excitement and interest around the latest NSF grant the lab secured has been fantastic. In the past month the project (which uses polarized light to better understand the UCL) has been featured in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, and on the radio thanks to the National Academy of Engineering.

The Lake lab recently secured a NSF grant to shine light of a known polarization state off the surface of the UCL, then use a bioinspired camera to measure the properties of the reflected light. Read the entire WashU press release here.

Congratulations to Alex Reiter on being selected to represent the graduate student body on the Washington University Board of Trustees. To see a full list of Trustee members and newly selected members click here. To see the MEMS announcement click here.

Congratulations to 4th year PhD student Chelsey Dunham. She was awarded a 2018  Doctoral Student Research Award and presented her research at the annual BME day. Chelsey received the award for the work she has completed on our post traumatic joint contracture project. See  a list of all BME award winner here.

From the innovative idea and strong work of Chelsey Dunham the lab secured a seed Grant from the WUSTL Center of Regenerative Medicine. The work will focus on mechanical priming to direct adipose progenitor cells toward an anti-fibrotic phenotype. To read the full WUSTL press release please click here.

Spencer Lake, assistant professor of mechanical engineering & materials science, has been awarded the Y.C. Fung Early Career Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the highest award for young investigators in bioengineering. Check out the entire WashU press release here.

The Lake lab recently secured funding from the NIH. With this new grant we will continue to study post-traumatic joint contracture. Read the full WashU press release here.

On July 24th 2017 Fei Fang officially defended her thesis to become Dr. Fei Fang. With the successful completion of her PhD Dr. Fang moved to Columbia University to a post doc position with the Thomopoulos lab group.

Dr. Spencer Lake has been selected to receive the 2016 Early Carer Award from the journal of Orthopaedic Research. The award highlights the work of a researcher early in his or her career who published a paper in the journal in the prior calendar year. Read the entire WashU press release here.

The Lake lab recently secured a NSF grant to continue our work looking at multi-scale tissue mechanics. Read the entire WashU press release here.

The use of polarized light to image microstructure of biological soft tissues has resulted in interesting data for the Lake Lab. Our work with Dr. Gruev was featured in a recent episode of the Explorer series on National Geographic. See the official WUSTL press release here.