Diego Almodiel and Marta Martínez Yus, PhD candidates in the Whiting School of Engineering’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, each received an American Heart Association Predoctoral Fellowship. The fellowships, worth $29,144 per year and spanning one or two years, will support their research focusing on improving cardiovascular health in atherosclerosis and aging. Both students are in their third year of studies in the Santhanam Lab at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Almodiel’s research focuses on the development of a therapeutic for atherosclerosis, a thickening or hardening of the arteries. His goal is to target anti-atherogenic pathways within macrophages—the main cell type involved in the formation and growth of plaque—to modulate local inflammation without causing any systemic side effects. He is working with Sujatha Kannan, the vice chair for research in the School of Medicine’s Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, and Kannan Rangaramanujam, the co-director of the Center for Nanomedicine, to develop strategies to use dendrimers—small, branched molecules—to target a certain type of white blood cell within atherosclerotic plaque.
Martínez Yus’s research focuses on improving cardiovascular health in post-menopausal women. Increased mechanical stiffness of the large conductance arteries in the body is a major contributing factor to the deterioration of cardiovascular health during aging, and post-menopausal women face a sudden and rapid shift in the material properties of the aorta. Martinez Yus is looking into whether the activation of matrix remodeling programs causes this shift and defining targetable enzymes to stave off this loss of mechanical homeostasis in the cardiovascular system.