Doctoral thesis success: Susanne Heid
We congratulate Susanne Heid for successfully defending her doctoral thesis titled “Alginate-based composite bioinks and thermoplastic polymers as biomaterials for sequential 3D printing of tissue constructs and bioreactors” on 15th March 2024. Susanne carried out her doctoral project in our Institute supervised by Prof. Aldo R. Boccaccini in the framework of the Collaborative Research Centre SFB/TRR 225 ‘From the fundamentals of biofabrication towards functional tissue models’ (project B03) in collaboration with Prof. Sahar Salehi at University of Bayreuth and Prof. Jan Hansmann (formerly at Fraunhofer ISC Würzburg). The examination board was composed by Prof. Boccaccini, Prof. Andreas Blaeser (Univ. of Darmstadt), Prof. Silvia Budday (Department of Mechanical Engineering, FAU), Prof. Sanna Virtanen (Institute Surface Science and Corrosion, FAU). Prof. Boccaccini highlighted the outstanding results obtained by Susanne in her research project, focusing on novel alginate-gelatine based printable hydrogels incorporating bioreactive inorganic fillers for biofabrication and the development of suitable bioreactors for bioprinting. Her work investigated the effect of such bioreactive fillers (ion releasing nanoparticles) on the key properties of the hydrogel before and after 3D printing. Susanne’s thesis led to publications in high impact journals (e.g. ref. [1], [2]).
Many congratulations to Susanne for her achievement, we wish her all the best in her future career.
[1] S. Heid, A. R. Boccaccini, Advancing bioinks for 3D bioprinting using reactive fillers: A review, Acta Biomaterialia 113 (2020) 1–22.
[2] S. Heid, et al., Bioprinting with bioactive alginate dialdehyde-gelatin (ADA-GEL) composite bioinks: Time-dependent in-situ crosslinking via addition of calcium-silicate particles tunes in vitro stability of 3D bioprinted constructs, Bioprinting 26 (2022) e00200
