Jennifer Lauren Young

Mechanobiology Institute - National University of Singapore

Jennifer Young was trained as a bioengineer at the University of California, Davis (B.S.) and the University of California, San Diego (Ph.D.). During her Ph.D. with Prof. Adam Engler, she studied the role of mechanics in cardiac development, and created a hydrogel system capable of mimicking dynamic tissue properties in vitro. Inspired by the role of extracellular matrix (ECM) in dictating cell behavior and fate, she joined Prof. Joachim Spatz’s Cellular Biophysics group at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research (Heidelberg, Germany) to study the contribution of nanoscale ECM cues to cellular function. There, she discovered that variations in nanoscale ligand presentation alone affect chemoresistance in breast cancer cells, which has great implications in cancer treatment strategies. In 2021, she joined the Mechanobiology Institute and Biomedical Engineering Department at the National University of Singapore where her work focuses on identifying and mimicking micro-to-nanoscale matrix properties and unraveling their contributions to cellular behavior in a diverse set of biological environments.