Yimin Luo wins NSF CAREER Award to engineer self-aligning tissue
Lab-grown tissue often falls apart in a way real tissue doesn't. Simply put, its cells refuse to organize the way they do in the body. Yimin Luo has won a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to close that critical gap.
Luo, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, will use the five-year grant to develop new materials and methods for guiding cells into organized, directional tissue structures. The NSF CAREER Award is a prestigious honor for young faculty members and supports the early career activities of teachers and scholars who are considered most likely to become the academic leaders of the future.
Many of the body's most important tissues only work because their cells line up in a consistent direction. The cells lining blood vessels, the fibers of striated muscle, and the cardiac cells that keep a heart beating all depend on this kind of organization to generate coordinated force across thousands of cells at once. When engineers try to recreate these tissues in the lab, the structures frequently fail to organize properly or stop functioning the way real tissue does. Another challenge is that structures fabricated in the lab can be highly detailed but are often difficult to scale up for practical applications.
"Cells don't just sit still and align themselves," Luo said. "They're constantly dividing, moving and pulling on their surroundings, communicating with their neighbors, and those behaviors all have to be coordinated for tissue to hold together and function. Right now, we don't have a reliable way to control that process."
Luo's approach borrows from liquid crystal physics, which describes how elongated molecules – and, it turns out, elongated cells – can spontaneously line up in consistent patterns over long distances. Her lab grows cells on engineered scaffolds whose physical properties influence cells toward alignment, then tracks how the cells' own division and movement either sharpen or scramble that order over time. It’s that process the project aims to bring under control rather than leave to chance. The project will also test how patterning living cell sheets in advance can cause them to fold and evolve, a behavior similar to how certain liquid crystal-based materials bend or curl in response to a stimulus. Unless traditional top-down methods, these processes are driven by force intrinsic to cells and better resemble natural tissue development.
"We're trying to figure out the design rules for how sheets of cells organize," Luo said. "We want to understand what tells them to align one way instead of another, and how we can use that knowledge to build tissue scaffolds that are reliable and inexpensive to produce."
The resulting design principles could help researchers build engineered tissues that organize and function more like those in the human body, improving tissue scaffolds for regenerative medicine, wound healing, disease modeling, and other biomedical applications.
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Published Date
Jul 13, 2026
