Erin Lavik

Lavik was given a chemistry set as a seven year old.[1] Her father is a lawyer and her mother is an accountant.[2] She was given a catapult as a teenager and broke her parents' windshield.[1] She attended National Cathedral School, and had to take advanced placement physics courses at the nearby boys' school St. Albans School.[2] Lavik was unsure whether to become a veterinarian or high school teacher, but her mother sat next to Martha Gray on an aeroplane and realised that she had a career Lavik would enjoy.[2] She completed her bachelor's degree in materials science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995.[3] She minored in theatre and is still a playwright.[4][5] Her master's PhD looked at the electrical properties of cerium(IV) oxide.[6] She stayed at MIT for her graduate studies, completing her master's degree and PhD in 2001.[3]

Lavik created polymer scaffolds were seeded with neural stem cells, and implanted them in to paralysed rats.[7][8] These spinal implants were developed whilst Lavik was a graduate student at MIT, mimicking the anatomy of the spine by binding a porous piece of polymer fabric and a plastic cylinder and including narrow channels for axons.[2] Lavik conducted the experiment on 50 female paraplegic rats, and 7 out of 10 rats fitted with Lavik's scaffold-stem cell design could walk again.[9] She was awarded the John Wuff Award for Excellence in Teaching.[10] In 2003, two years after graduating her PhD, she was nominated to the TR100 list.[7] Lavik was an assistant professor at Yale University, where she developed polymer scaffolds that imitate the spinal cord.[11] She was nominated for a 2004 WIRED RAVE Award.[1] In 2004 Lavik wrote the play Galileo Walking among the Stars, a play where Galileo, Kepler and Gene Kelly build a spaceship.[12][13] She was selected as one of the Connecticut Technology Council's top women in innovation in 2008.[14]

Lavik was made an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University where she worked on nanotechnology and biodegradable polymers.[15] Today she is a member of the College of Engineering and Information Technology at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.[16] She is interested in translatable approaches to treat injuries and disease.[3] She works on tissue engineering and diseases of the central nervous system, including glaucoma and retinal degeneration.[3][17]

Lavik has explored ways that nanoparticles can help reduce internal bleeding.[18][19] The nanoparticles attach to activated platelets, forming clots and stopping bleeding.[18] The nanoparticles are delivered intravenously and include a molecule that binds to a glycoprotein.[20] They are based on poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid), polyethylene glycol and Arginine-Glycine-Aspartic acid.[21] Lavik developed the nanoparticles using pig's blood, identifying which had the appropriate immune response.[20][22] The nanoparticles could half the bleeding time in femoral artery models. Lavik and her team hoped that medics and emergency responders would carry the nanoparticles to treat traumatic injuries.[23] In 2010 she was awarded the National Institutes of Health Director's New Innovator Award for the discovery.[24] The NIH grant allows Lavik to explore the nanoparticles traumatic injuries of the central nervous system.[25] The work underwent clinical tests at Case Western Reserve University.[26] She found that the length of the polyethylene glycol arms and choice of peptide impacts the efficacy and clearance of the nanoparticles.[21] She has also looked at spinal cord injury, exploring the optimal time to deliver nanoparticles after traumatic injury.[25] Alongside her work on nanoparticles, Lavik engineers solutions for retinal degeneration, including screen printing human eye tissues.[27][28] Her technique, which layers adult stem cells, was selected by the National Eye Institute's 3-D Retina Organoid Challenge.[27][29][30][31] She contributed to the 2013 Elsevier book Retina, talking about drug delivery.[32]

Lavik is a member of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County Women in Science and Engineering group.[33] She is an advocate for improving diversity in the sciences.[34] She was made a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2014.[26] In 2016 she delivered a TEDxBroadway talk on theatre and engineering.[35] She discussed the importance of collaboration in scientific research and teamwork in theatre.[35]