Bria Macklin began her career in chemical and biomolecular engineering during her senior year in high school at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute when she interned in a lab at Johns Hopkins University. There was just one problem: “Initially, high school was a struggle for me because I always dreamed of being an actress,” says Macklin.
Her father urged her to pursue science, “and I said ‘OK, but I’m not too happy about it,’” she recalls wit a laugh, now calling it “the best decision I could have made.”
Since the high school internship, Macklin has become an award-winning, published scholar and graduate researcher in the Gerecht Laboratory at Johns Hopkins, where she is currently completing her Ph.D. in chemical and biomedical engineering. She is a Class of 2021 Siebel Scholar, an award bestowed to about 90 students from the world’s leading graduate schools.
“My research involves using stem cells to create or regenerate blood vessels,” she says. “In the lab, we are able to differentiate stem cells into vascular cells over eight days. We can then use these cells in hydrogels and watch them form vessel-like structures.” She adds that the cells can also be used as a cellular therapy to regenerate blood vessels in animal models.
“My Ph.D. has been aimed at understanding how these cells innately are able to create these blood vessels and how we as engineers can control the process” says Macklin, who was scheduled to defend her thesis on March 4.
Dr. Sharon Gerecht, director of the Institute for Nanobiotechnology, describes Macklin’s early contributions in her lab working with a graduate student to determine appropriate three-dimensional culture environments for tube formation by vascular cells. Gerecht notes that Macklin was “quick to learn new techniques” when given a project and “took it on with a tenacious spirit.”
Gerecht says Macklin followed the progression of tube formations subjected to a variety of chemical modulators and assessed the results. That work resulted in Macklin, as an undergraduate, being credited as co-author on the research, which was published in 2014 in Methods in Molecular Biology and titled “Derivation and Network Formation of Vascular Cells from Human Pluripotent Stem Cells.”
