Prakash Parthiban Selvakumar

What are your primary research and scholarly interests?

I am interested in engineering blood vessels on all length scales. Applying engineering principles to fabricate dense functional blood vessels in a thick synthetic tissue is an unsolved problem, and my group has taken up this intellectual challenge.

How does this tie into the work you are doing with ND-ACES?

I am working with the Materials Pillar of the Center for Cellular Biointerfaces in Science and Engineering (CCBSE). My expertise lends hands to vascularize cancer test bed materials, thereby, better mimicking the native extracellular matrix environment encountered by the cells.

Where are you from and where did you pursue your education?

I am from India and got my bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Madras, India. My Ph.D. is from Nagoya University, Japan.

What motivates you?

From a teaching perspective, finding new ways to present a concept to the students motivates me to teach. On the research perspective, the fact that scientists could not engineer a thick vascularized synthetic tissue more than a few millimeters thick baffles and motivates me to find new ways to do research in tissue engineering.

What was your first job?

Proofreader - English books and journals

What does your very best day include?

One where I can come up with a working hypothesis on a research problem and design relevant experiments around it.

What’s your favorite quote?

“Study hard what interest you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent, and original manner possible.” – Richard Feynman