Our Lab, Summer 2008
Photo by Judit Fabian
Welcome to the Microbicide Delivery Lab
We are a research group in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Utah. This site is designed to give an overview of our work and is oriented toward prospective coworkers, students and collaborators. It also acts a resource for group members in their work.
A brief overview of our interdisciplinary program.
The research in our group is focused on the creation, development, and application of new materials and delivery technology to prevent the sexual transmission of HIV. Our designs start with a biological or physical problem, e.g. how can we increase the pharmacological duration of a semisolid gel in the vaginal lumen. Then we use a materials engineering approach that takes into account the requisite composition-structure-property relationships required in a system that will help us solve the problem at hand. Along the way we often get inspiration from nature in our proposed solution. We use synthetic chemistry and polymer synthesis to construct these materials and modern analytical and bioanalytical methods to characterize their composition, structure, properties and performance.
Making useful materials is difficult without interacting with researchers from other areas of engineering and science so we collaborate with chemists, biologists and engineers from industry and academia. No one group has all the answers. If you are interested in our research, become acquainted with the people who do it by browsing the group members and P. Kiser buttons. Learn more about what we do outside the lab by going to the Gallery, and see the stunning Utah outdoors and our great city SLC. We hope that you will find this web site informative. For more information please contact us.
