Weekly BIONews + How lab-built tissues can transform women’s health

Join B2DG members and guests for our June 9th evening meeting as we review the weekly BIONews and then have a live presentation:
“How lab-built tissues can transform women’s health.”

Kayla Wolf, PhD
Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering at the Meinig School
Cornell University
Women’s reproductive health remains profoundly understudied. A major barrier is the lack of suitable experimental models for discovery and therapeutic testing. Animal models do not capture unique features of human physiology, and human studies are limited by ethical and practical constraints. We are addressing this gap by engineering human reproductive tissues on a chip that capture critical physiological functions. To recreate tissue organization and composition, we combine stem cell and organoid technologies with biofabrication approaches such as bioprinting. These engineered tissues enable new opportunities to interrogate reproductive tissue physiology from menstruation to menopause and accelerate therapeutic development for women’s health.
June 9, 2026
6:15 pm - 8:30 pm
Zoom talk: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83593256859
Dr. Kayla Wolf is an assistant professor in biomedical engineering at the Meinig School. Her laboratory is addressing critical needs in kidney and women’s health by engineering tissues on chip that can accelerate discovery and therapeutic screening. Previously, she was an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. Jennifer Lewis’s laboratory at Harvard University, where she developed a stem cell-derived perfusable kidney collecting duct on-chip that can be used for disease modeling or embedded within biomanufactured tissue. She received her Ph.D. in bioengineering from the joint program at University of California, Berkeley – University of California, San Francisco. During her graduate studies, she investigated how tumor cell-matrix interactions influence cell invasion and could therefore be leveraged as therapeutic targets. Dr. Wolf is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Predoctoral Fellow (F31), and Siebel Fellow. Prior to her PhD, she earned a B.S. in chemistry and a B.S. in human biology from Michigan State University.

Event Leader:
Harry Wachob, PhD