Seminars

Damage to nerve tissue can greatly diminish quality of life for those with traumatic injuries. Dr. Schmidt’s research focuses on natural-based biomaterials that interact with neurons to stimulate and guide regeneration. These biomaterials can ultimately be used for facial and hand reconstruction or in trauma cases and potentially could be used to aid the regeneration of damaged spinal cord as well. This presentation will focus first on peripheral nerve applications and one key success that is the foundation for the Avance Nerve Graft from Axogen (Alachua, FL). In addition, along the way to uncovering strategies for nerve regeneration, Dr. Schmidt and her team also discovered a biomaterial processing approach that led to a separate application of protecting tissues after surgery, resulting in VersaWrap from Alafair Biosciences, a start-up company in Austin, Texas. More recently, her team is engineering injectable biomaterials for spinal cord injury (SCI), particularly compressive injuries. In rat models, these materials have shown therapeutic potential for SCI and promise as delivery vehicles for cell transplantation therapies.

Dr. Christine Schmidt is a Distinguished Professor and J. Crayton Pruitt Family Endowed Chair at the University of Florida, where she also served as Department Chair of Biomedical Engineering. She earned her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her B.S. from the University of Texas at Austin. An elected member of the NAE, NAM, and ASEMFL, she is also a Fellow of several leading scientific and engineering societies and an inductee of the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame. Dr. Schmidt’s honors include AIMBE’s prestigious Pierre Galletti Award and the BMES Athanasiou Medal of Excellence in Translational Bioengineering. Her biomaterials research has advanced neural tissue engineering and enabled technologies such as Axogen’s Avance® Nerve Graft and Alafair Biosciences’ VersaWrap®.