Lesley W. Chow joined Lehigh following her postdoctoral training at Imperial College London and PhD at Northwestern University. Her research interests focus on the design of novel biomaterials for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine applications. Building on her previous experience with supramolecular design and biomaterial fabrication, the Chow Lab combines different materials and advanced fabrication techniques to generate scaffolds with architectures and spatially organized functionality that resemble native biological tissues. Chow is particularly interested in utilizing 3D printing and self-assembly approaches to organize synthetic polymers, natural biopolymers, and peptides into hierarchical structures and compositions. These scaffolds serve as platforms to deepen understanding about how native tissue organization affects cell and tissue function across length scales and improve clinical translation of biomaterials.
The Chow Lab is currently focused on approaches to improve regeneration of musculoskeletal tissue interfaces, such as the osteochondral interface between bone and cartilage. Recreating these complex interface poses a significant engineering challenge as native tissues possess gradients in biochemical, structural, and mechanical properties that are critical for normal biomechanical function. Her team is developing biomaterials-based strategies to guide spatial cell behavior and tissue formation to engineer tissues that mimic these structure-function-property relationships.
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