Polak awarded for top MRS student presentation

Samantha Jane Polak, a graduate student working under MechSE Professor Amy Wagoner Johnson, was recently awarded at the Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meeting for having one of the top four student presentations in her symposium.

The MRS is an organization of materials researchers from academia, industry, and government that promotes communication for the advancement of interdisciplinary materials research to improve the quality of life. It has more than 16,000 members in the United States and 70 other countries. The MRS’s Fall Meeting is one of two annual meetings that feature about 100 symposia on topics relating to materials research.

Polak presented her talk—titled “The Influence of CaP on Bone Formation and Vascularization”—in the Biomaterials for Tissue Regeneration symposium, as one of many students and experts presenting their research over the six-day conference. In it, she discussed her in vivo and in vitro work with hydroxyapatite bone scaffolds.

Professor Wagoner Johnson’s research group specifically deals with ceramic bone scaffolds used for helping to repair bone damage or loss. Because of complications associated with allograft and autograft materials, and the challenge of finding donor tissue, synthetic material—such as the hydroxyapatite of ceramic bone scaffolds—is thought to be an attractive replacement for allograft and autograft bone. However, there is still much to understand about how the material works, and Polak’s research is trying to find insight into those processes.

“We’re looking at bone formation not just in terms of how much bone there is, but what the morphology is, how it’s distributed throughout the scaffold,” Polak said. “We link all of that together to get a defined healing time, because no one really knows how much bone is healed or when a defect really is healed, there’s no value for that. We’ve established that microporosity does reduce the healing time, and it results in a more favorable distribution and more volume, but no one really knows why.”

The main goal of the research is to further understand the mechanisms behind how the ceramic bone scaffolds facilitate bone repair, and thereby optimize the process for more efficient healing of the bone. This accomplishment could significantly improve the lives of bone trauma or bone disease patients.

“You can’t really use it to its best ability if you don’t know how it’s actually working,” Polak said.

More information about Polak, Professor Wagoner Johnson, and their research can be found here.