I am Castro Johnbosco, a fourth year Ph.D. student at the Leijten Lab, Department of Developmental Bioengineering, University of Twente, The Netherlands. My research focuses on developing engineered modular tissue constructs, with emergent mechano-regulatory properties.

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Being intrigued by the field of Biomedical engineering, my undergraduate studies persuaded me to pursue an interest in biomaterials-driven technologies for therapeutic applications. Such interests further motivated me to enter a Master's Program at FH Aachen, Germany with a focus on Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering. With subjective theoretical knowledge, I undertook lab rotation projects at the Leibniz Institute, Dresden, Germany focusing more on biomaterial synthesis and mechanical characterization, with the application of such materials onto medical devices to study blood-material interactions. Moving towards the completion of the program, I had the opportunity to further strengthen my knowledge, by performing my Master's thesis project on developing mechanically strong double network hydrogels for bioprinting concepts at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, both of my projects led to meaningful outcomes and publications.

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With such experiences in cell biomaterial interactions, I started my Ph. D on developing emergent material-driven single-cell technologies for stem cell screening and understanding the fundamental mechanobiological responses of stem cells in 3D. We sought to encapsulate single cells in 3D matrices and study how biophysical properties dictated mainly by mechanical stimuli could orchestrate the differentiation potential of such stem cells. Having studied such behavior I intend to use these single-cell micro building blocks (single stem cell microniches) to construct engineered tissues with hierarchical mechano-physical properties. Such material design can closely resemble native tissue architecture and function and we hypothesize it could provide new directions to next-generation bottom-up engineering with hierarchical, modular properties.