Danielle Yarborough comes from a small rural town in east Texas. A graduate of Texas A&M, Danielle is pursuing her PhD at Hopkins, advised by Sharon Gerecht. Danielle uses 3D in vitro tissue engineered vascular grafts in a bioreactor system to model disease in small arteries. She will use human induced pluripotent stem cell lines to examine cell-cell interactions between endothelial cells and smooth muscle cells in this model system, with a particular focus on the role of smooth muscle cells in vascular fibrosis. Her goal is to better understand mechanisms underlying this disease state, as this could potentially lead to new treatment or prevention strategies in the future.
Colin Yancey is a Marylander through and through: grew up in Ellicott City and educated at the University of Maryland, College Park. As a Hopkins PhD candidate, Colin is designing molecular circuits, essentially nanomachines, as sensors. Traditional biosensors pick up a chemical’s presence to diagnose disease. But many signals of interest are reflected not by a chemical’s presence, but by how that chemical’s abundance changes over time. Colin will develop a new type of sensor that identifies changes in a chemical’s abundance. His work could lead to the development of more reliable diagnostics or individualized therapeutics.