Engineering Biological Function and Form

Beth L. Pruitt, Ph.D.  
Associate Professor & Silas H. Palmer Faculty Scholar
Departments of Mechanical Engineering, and Molecular & Cellular Physiology
Stanford University

Quantitative  experiments  in  cellular  biomechanics  and  mechanotransduction  assays  demand  novel  measurement  and  analysis  systems  with  appropriately  tuned  mechanical  environments  and  imaging  access.  We  design  and  fabricate  our  own  tools  and  systems  to  address  specific  measurement  needs  and are concerned with robust manufacturing and ease of operation for biological research. Biological questions of interest include the mechanisms and forces of cell adhesion and tissue development in response to physiological mechanical stimuli. These studies require deformable culture systems designed with appropriate cell-substrate interfaces, cell-cell interactions, and embedded force metrologies compatible with live  cell  imaging.  We  deploy  deformable  cell  culture  environments  and  microsystems  to  apply  strain  to  cells  cultured  in  2D  monolayers  or  encapsulated  in  3D  scaffolds.  Multi-well  and  micropatterned  devices  enable testing multiple conditions such as strain magnitude, biaxial or uniaxial strains in one experiment for high throughput screening of parameters. I will discuss the design and application of quantitative and fundamental biophysical assays to open questions of mechanobiology in cell physiology, stem cells, and biology together with our collaborators. 

Dr.  Pruitt  is  from  Massachusetts  and  received  the  B.S.M.E.  in  1991  from  the  Massachusetts  Institute  of  Technology (MIT). She was in Navy ROTC at MIT where she learned sailing, leadership, and perseverance and later served as an officer in the US Navy. She received an M.S. in Manufacturing Systems Engineering  in  1992  from  Stanford  University  then  served  as  an  officer  in  the  U.S.  Navy,  first  at  the  engineering headquarters of the nuclear program then as a teaching Systems Engineering and offshore sailing at the U.S. Naval Academy. She earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in 2002 at Stanford University  where  she  specialized  in  MEMS  and  small-scale  metrologies  for  electrical  contacts.  She  was  a postdoctoral  researcher  at  the  Swiss  Federal  Institute  of  Technology  Lausanne  (EPFL)  from  2002-2003  where she worked on polymer MEMS. Beth Pruitt joined the Mechanical Engineering faculty of Stanford in Fall 2003 and founded the Stanford Microsystems Lab which currently includes 12 trainees. She was a visiting professor in the Lab for Applied Mechanobiology in the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at ETH, Zurich in 2012. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and a friendly vizsla.