News

Dr Anna Stejskalová, the first PhD student to graduate from the Almquist Lab, has been awarded the Imperial College London Emerging Alumni Leader Award for 2021! Anna does incredible work inside and outside the lab, and it is no surprise that she is one of the most recent graduates to ever with this award. Well done Anna - copious amounts of high fives coming your way from London!

We have been awarded, in collaboration with the Higgins Lab at Imperial Bioengineering, Prof Maya Buch from the University of Machester, and Dr Francesco Del Galdo from the University of Leeds a grant to develop a minimally invasive diagnostic device for the rare disease scleroderma! Exciting times!

Congratulations to Nuria for winning the 2020 Wound Shark Innovation Competition, sponsored by Alira Health, at the Annual Wound Healing Society meeting! Well done - we are all so happy for you!

Congratulations to Nuria for being shortlisted for the prestigious L'Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award for the second time! Good luck - we are all cheering for you!

Our recent research papers have been recognised as being in the 10% most downloaded in their journal during 2018/2019! Glad to see the interest across our diverse reseach areas. These papers dispel a 40-year-old misconception regarding the mechanism by which metals catalyse the etching of silicon in dry reactive plasmas, and unveil our TrAP technology for cell activated growth factors via cellular traction forces.    

Nuria has been selected to be part of Cohort 3 in the MedTech SuperConnector programme! She will be using the opportunity to push our TrAP technology towards clinical translation. Her aim is to explore the potential revolutionary potential of TrAPs for treating non-union fractures. Here's an Imperial news story for more details.   

Nuria has won the European Tissue Repair Society's Young Investigator Award at this year's annual meeting in Munich for her research on TrAPs! As the winner, Nuria will represent Europe in the USA at the Wound Healing Society meeting in 2020. A big congratulations from all of us in the Almquist Lab!

Congratulations to Dr Almquist on being promoted to Senior Lecturer, effective 1 Sept 2019!

We have been awarded, in collaboration with the Kozlov and Rowlands Labs, 'blue skies' funding from Imperial's Excellence Fund for Frontier Research. This funding for ambitious and intrinsically riskly research will enable us to combine nanofabrication, biophotonics, and neuroscience to create a new method for studying communication across neural networks. Very cool, but there is more! The same technology may also unlock new possibilities in other areas such as synthetic biology! Exciting times!

Anna, Nuria, and Frances' paper in Advanced Materials keeps collecting milestones. The newest one is capturing the spot as the most accessed article in Advanced Materials in February 2019! Well done all on such a well received paper!

Anna, Nuria, and Frances' paper in Advanced Materials on traction force-activated growth factors has extended its time as the top article on F1000 Workspace! Congrats to the research team yet again on this accomplishment. Make sure to get in touch if you'd like to use TrAPs in you own experiments!

Anna, Nuria, and Frances' paper in Advanced Materials on traction force-activated growth factors is the top article on F1000 Workspace this month. Congrats to the research team on this distinction, especially knowing all the hard work that went into getting this platform off the ground! Stay tuned for new exciting research with the TrAP platform...

Dr Almquist was back at Michiagn Tech for the inaugural 5 Under 35(ish) event. He spoke on the importance of tenacious curiosity, embracing failure, and working towards being mentally healthy.

Congratulations Julia for publishing your newest paper entitled Interfacial Contact is Required for Metal-Assisted Plasma Etching of Silicon! This research dispels a misconception that has been around for approximately 40 years regarding the mechanism by which metals enhance the etching of silicon in reactive plasmas.

Congratulations Carmen and Frances on graduation! Frances was an undergraduate researcher in the Almquist Lab before completing her MEng thesis in the lab, while Carmen joined on for her MEng thesis project. Everyone in the Almquist Lab is looking forward to the exciting research you will be starting at University of Cambridge (Frances) and MIT (Carmen). Best of luck and be sure to stay in touch!

Congratulations Anna for successfully defending your thesis! Thanks to Dr John Connelly and Prof Peter Weinberg for taking the time for the viva. Best wishes Anna for your move to University of Munster after receiving a WiRe Postdoctoral Fellowship!

Congratulations Nuria for your selection to the inaugural early career advisory board for the journal ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering! All of us in the Almquist Lab are happy to see that your excellent insights and vision for the field will be put to use helping guide such a great journal.

Congratulations Julia for winning GTA of the year for the Faculty of Engineering at Imperial! All your students appreciate the effort you put into being such a great GTA, and this recognition simply adds to the back-to-back GTA of the Year awards from the Student Academic Choice Awards programme you already have received!

Nuria gave a great talk on the emerging field of personalised biomaterials at this year's New Scientist Live event at the ExCeL Centre in London. She addressed a great question: if medicine has recognized, identified and responded to differences between patients, why is the biomaterials community still developing off-the-shelf, multi-patient innovations?

Dr Almquist was back in the USA to give a talk at the Gordon Research Conference on Signal Transduction by Engineered Extracellular Matrices. His talk was entitled "Cell-Activated Growth Factors for Spatiotemporal Tissue Engineering", covering the research being done by Anna and Nuria. There was also a mini Hammond Lab reunion at the conference, with Paula, Nisarg (congrats on your faculty position at UCSD), and Ben in attendance.

Jill has won first place in the Imperial Graduate School Masters 3.60 thesis presentation competition. Her thesis is exploring the use of hair follicle-derived cells and materials for creating bioinspired implants. Looking forward to what more she will discover before moving on to her PhD position at the Karolinska Institute!

We have been awarded, in collaboration with the Higgins Lab, seed funding from the Imperial Confidence in Concept program to explore the controlled delivery of novel proteins for wound healing. Looking forward to this exciting collaboration over the course of the next year!

Magda, a joint PhD student with the Higgins Lab, has received 3rd place in the student talk competition at the joint 2018 ScarCon and European Tissue Repair Society meeting in Amsterdam! A big congratulations from all of us in the Almquist Lab!

Congratulations to Nuria for being shortlisted for the prestigious L'Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science Fellowship - quite an accomplishment to be one of eleven shortlisted out of over 1000 applications! Good luck - we are all cheering for you!

Congratulations to Nuria for being awarded a TecnioSPRING+ Postdoctoral Fellowship, which is part of the the Horizon 2020 Marie Curie Actions! Looking forward to the collaboration with IQS in Barcelona that this will enable!

Mehrdad's review article entitled "The Hair Follicle: An Underutilized Source of Cells and Materials for Regenerative Medicine", written in collaboration with the Higgins Lab, is featured on the cover of the Regenerative Biomaterials theme issue of ACS Bioamterials Science & Engineering. Check it out if you want to learn about one of only two structures in the body that regenerate, and the unique cells and materials that it provides for regenerative engineering.