Adrianne Rosales, associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, will give the talk "Multiscale control of dynamic covalent hydrogels for bioinspired applications" at 3:05 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 15, in 10 Sparks Building on the University Park campus.
The talk is part of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering's (MatSE) 590 Seminar series. The talk is free and open to the public.
Rosales' research focuses on engineering biomimetic and polymeric materials for applications in human health. She develops dynamic polymer systems that replicate the complex and evolving environments found in biological systems. By combining principles from chemical engineering, materials science and biology, she engineers materials that help researchers better understand cell behavior, tissue development, and disease progression while advancing new approaches for human health applications.
In her talk, Rosales will discuss dynamic covalent hydrogels, a class of soft materials inspired by the transient polymer networks found throughout biological systems. These materials have attracted significant attention as potential extracellular matrix mimics and injectable therapeutic delivery vehicles because of their ability to relax stress, self-heal and can be engineered to possess a range of mechanical properties.
"Transient polymer networks are found throughout biological systems, both intracellularly and extracellularly," Rosales said. "Hydrogels with dynamic linkers have garnered intense interest as extracellular matrix mimics and injectable delivery vehicles due to their tailorable viscoelasticity, stress relaxation, and self-healing behavior. However, to fully enable these applications, there remains a need to understand how linking chemistry affects gelation and nonlinear rheological properties."
Rosales will explain how linking chemistry influences gel formation, rheological behavior, and network structure, as well as present findings that reveal how molecular interactions govern hydrogel mechanics and flow.
"We have developed synthetic multi-arm polyethylene glycol (PEG) hydrogels with three different dynamic covalent linking chemistries," Rosales said. "This suite of dynamic covalent linkages allows control over the bond exchange kinetics across three orders of magnitude, which dictates hydrogel viscoelasticity under small amplitude oscillatory shear. Overall, this work provides insight into the molecular and structural characteristics that govern dynamic covalent PEG gelation, mechanics, and flow, while also informing the types of scaffolds applicable to tissue engineering and therapeutic delivery."
Rosales earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and a doctorate in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. She also was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
About the MatSE 590 Seminar Series
The fall 2026 MatSE 590 Seminar series offer graduate students, faculty and the general public a wide range of lectures featuring invited speakers from academia and industry, providing a platform for sharing research, exploring emerging topics and fostering interdisciplinary dialogue in materials science and engineering.
Support for the MatSE 590 Seminar series is made possible through the generous contributions of industry partners through the Friends of MatSE program.
