Amy Wagoner Johnson, an assistant professor of mechanical science and engineering, has received a Collaborative Research Grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to further her successful research in healing critical-size bone defects with calcium-phosphate based “scaffolds” that aid bone growth.
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Amy Wagoner Johnson, an assistant professor of mechanical science and engineering, has received a Collaborative Research Grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to further her successful research in healing critical-size bone defects with calcium-phosphate based “scaffolds” that aid bone growth.
Amy Wagoner Johnson
Wagoner Johnson's work in biomaterials is laying the scientific groundwork for the design of synthetic bone substitute materials and systems that may one day replace bone grafts currently harvested from patients themselves or from donors.
Her previous research on bone scaffolds has shown that bone will grow into smaller pores than had been previously thought possible. The NSF-funded project, “Collaborative Research: Regulators of cellular microenvironment and multiscale osteointegration," aims to discover how to design the materials to optimally interface with bone and aid in the healing process of severe breaks or defects.
“Some of my other work has been studies in which we showed that this particular type of bone-tissue scaffold that we were using was really a lot more effective in-vivo,” Wagoner Johnson explained. “So now we’re trying to go back into a dish and try to figure out what is it about the material or the environment that gave us this really unexpected result.
“We want to understand what is it about that environment that makes the cells work to get into those small pores,” Wagoner Johnson said. “They have to want to go in there, and so we want to know why.”
The $404,990 award is a collaborative research grant that goes to researchers who team up from different institutions. Wagoner Johnson will collaborate with University of Wisconsin bio-medical engineering professor Bill Murphy on this project.
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Contact:Amy J. Wagoner Johnson, Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, 217/265-5581.
Writer:William Bowman, associate director of communications, Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, 217/244-0901.
If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.