From ski slopes to Girl Scouts, Rosalyn Abbott's classroom of choice has evolved over the years, but her love for teaching and discovery remains a steady constant. On any given day, she can be found integrating biomaterials, namely silk, with tissue engineering techniques in her lab, or teaching introductory engineering courses to undergraduate students at Carnegie Mellon University. Her group's latest research uncovered a novel finding — that silk scaffolding is responsive to ultrasound.
Silk is a safe, unique and versatile natural biomaterial that has successfully been used in wound healing and in tissue engineering of cartilage, tendon and ligament tissues. It can easily be extracted from several sources, most commonly a Bombyx mori cocoon, and from there processed into different formats including gels, scaffolds and films.
