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Postdoctoral Scholar
Renato Navarro
Postdoctoral Scholar, Materials Science and Engineering
My research goal is to achieve comprehensive solutions to cardiovascular clinical challenges via chemistry approaches to produce tailorable materials that serve as scaffolds or therapeutic delivery vehicles that enhance tissue regeneration. I am a trained polymer chemist with expertise in biomaterials engineering for cardiovascular regeneration and nanomedicine. My graduate research experience, under the supervision of Peter X. Ma, focused on broadening the use of tunable tissue engineering scaffolds by developing polymers with chemical functionality that can be easily and rapidly fashioned into biomimetic physical constructs and activated with regulatory signals (biomolecules, peptides, and growth factors). I accomplished this by developing novel polymer synthesis methods that are cost-effective and facile to ease the path toward clinical translation. As a postdoctoral scholar, my current training is under the co-supervision of Prof. Sarah Heilshorn and Prof. Joseph Wu as a K99/R00 MOSAIC Fellow. My work entails the development of tailored injectable hydrogels for the local delivery of therapies after a myocardial infarct.