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Ms. Evitts is a Bioengineering graduate student performing her Ph.D. thesis studies in the labs of Jessica Young and Ying Zheng. Her thesis project is focused on developing a stem cell based model of the human neurovascular unit (NVU) to study neurovascular interactions in the brain and investigate neurovascular dysfunction in age-related neurodegenerative diseases. Her goal is to develop and implement strategies for vascularizing cortical organoids and combine the Young lab’s expertise in neural stem cell and cortical organoid differentiation with the Zheng lab’s engineered microvessel platform to generate a living, perusable, multicellular model of the NVU. She will employ this model to provide mechanistic insight into the relationship between the vasculature and brain cells in both aging and neurodegeneration.
