Britta Koch Receives Early Career Researcher Award

Dr Britta Koch received the 2017 Early Career Researcher award

Dr Britta Koch received the 2017 Early Career Researcher award of the Biomaterial Interface Division at the AVS 64^th International Symposium in Tampa, Florida. The award was announced at the start of her contributed talk and comprises funds to cover her symposium registration and $250 towards accommodation and travel. 

Britta’s current research aims to enhance our understanding of biomaterial-cell interactions with the objective of deriving design rules that allow the fabrication of in vivo-relevant cell culture environments. Within the EPSRC Programme Grant in Next Generation Biomaterials Discovery, she is developing a high-throughput approach to investigate the effect of biomaterial chemistry and topography on cell fate. By combining the printing of biomaterial microarrays with the surface patterning approach of the TopoChip technology, she has established a platform that allows combinatorial screening and the correlation of cell response with results from established analytical surface characterisation techniques (AFM, ToF-SIMS, contact angle and fluorescence microscopy). Britta also closely collaborates with the group of Professor Jan de Boer (MERLN, Maastricht University). She is particularly interested in identifying favorable conditions that enhance the osteogenic differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), thereby contributing to the fields of bone tissue engineering and our general understanding of cell-biomaterial interactions.