Wagoner Johnson to engineer 3D microenvironments at French university

2/28/2014 Meredith Staub

Associate Professor Amy Wagoner Johnson has been selected as a Chair of Excellence by the NanoSciences Foundation in Grenoble, France.

Written by Meredith Staub

Associate Professor Amy Wagoner Johnson has been selected as a Chair of Excellence by the NanoSciences Foundation in Grenoble, France.

The NanoSciences Foundation supports a network of 33 laboratories employing about 1,000 scientists in total. The Foundation's main goals are to foster nanoscience research in their networked laboratories by encouraging collaborative and multidisciplinary projects. The Chair of Excellence program was created to attract talented international researchers to Grenoble, where they are given space and resources to collaborate with each other.

Wagoner Johnson will mainly be collaborating with her "host" researcher in Grenoble, Professor Catherine Picart of the Grenoble Institute of Technology, although the project involves researchers from three other laboratories. Professors Picart and Wagoner Johnson will co-advise a post-doctoral associate over a two-year period with the funding. The objective of their project is to engineer novel 3D microenvironments to better understand cell-cell and cell-material interactions and to enhance cell differentiation and tissue formation, particularly in bone tissue.

Wagoner Johnson's research on campus has mainly focused on engineering and studying ceramic scaffolds that have porosity on both the macro (>100 microns) and the micro (<50 microns) scales and that can be used to regenerate injured or decayed bone. She hopes that the results of the project in Grenoble will yield greater knowledge and understanding about the basic science behind scaffold-based bone repair and regeneration.

"With the scaffolds, we found that cells were pulled into micropores by capillary forces and were trapped in the micropores. This process appears to enhance bone formation in vivo," Wagoner Johnson said. "Now we are combining the scaffold work with other work we are doing in my lab in order to tailor the 3D microenvironment in these pores where the cells are trapped. The proposed research leans a little more towards basic science as compared to the 3D scaffold project. Ultimately, however, the application would be for bone implant materials."

Wagoner Johnson and her family will spend 13 months in Grenoble next year, and she will then return the following summer to finish up her work. Moving to France is a big transition, but she says she and her family have been preparing.

"Our whole family’s going, and so our kids will go to school there," Wagoner Johnson said. "They don’t know French, but they’re learning! My father took a sabbatical in France when I was a junior in high school, so I lived there for a year. I am excited to have this opportunity with my own family on sabbatical now, twenty-some years later."
 


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This story was published February 28, 2014.