You could almost say Edwin Shen was destined to become a bioengineer. His mother, a medical doctor, practices pathology in Northern California, and his father retired from a career as a mechanical engineer for medical device companies.
“I guess what I do is right in the middle of my parents’ occupations,” he said. “Bioengineering was something my dad recommended I try. I thought research might be something that aligned well with my personality. It turned out to be a perfect fit.”
Shen, from Los Angeles, earned a bachelor’s degree in bioengineering from UC Merced in 2014 just three years after arriving on campus. He pursued a Ph.D. in Biological Engineering and Small-Scale Technologies — now known as the Materials and Biomaterials Engineering Graduate Group.
Professor Kara McCloskey said Shen was a top-performing bioengineering undergraduate student and his outstanding problem-solving and writing skills made him an excellent candidate for the graduate program.
His research in McCloskey’s research laboratory focused on two projects. One was the differentiation of human stem cells into a vascular cell type called a vascular smooth muscle. The second was addressing the lack of complexity and affordability in current bioprinting devices.
For the latter, Shen designed a multi-material bioprinter with novel features that improve resolution and embed hydrogels with concentration gradients of small molecules. He printed fragile induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC), which are well-known for their propensity to self-assemble into tissue and demonstrate their high viability in long-term printed culture. He guided these iPSC toward vascular smooth muscle fate through fluorescently activated cell sorting and optimized cell culture conditions.
As a graduate student, Shen was awarded a National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corp) grant with McCloskey, fellow UC Merced graduate student, and now alumna, Rachel Hatano, and Elliot Botvinick from UC Irvine to investigate the commercialization potential of the bioprinter he developed. The grant provided them with funds for an immersive, entrepreneurial training program that facilitates customer discovery to see if the product is viable for industry.
“We went through the program and got entrepreneurship training, but ultimately it felt like industry was not ready for what our product could offer. They wanted us to modify the system for reproducible cell culture plating — something much simpler,” he said. “Building my own bioprinter got me acclimated to programming and hardware machinery. A lot of the process development I do now deals with things like automation and troubleshooting machines.”
