Shahzad Hafeez
Developing and investigating extracellular mimicking viscoelastic supramolecular hydrogels for tissue engineering applications
Shahzad received his Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering from University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan. In 2013, he moved to Germany where he studied a master program “Advanced Materials and Processes” from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Germany. He carried out his master thesis at Julius Wolff Institute, Charite, Berlin in collaboration with Institute of Biomaterials, FAU, Germany.
In his thesis work, he worked towards developing void forming composite (alginate and 45S5 bioglass) hydrogels for bone tissue engineering. While working on this project, he realized that hydrogels interest him and he would like to further learn on how to tune hydrogels dynamics to recapitulate ECM dynamicity and viscoelasticity. Since December 2016, he joined CTR as a PhD student. He is working on developing supramolecular BTAs hydrogels and investigating how viscoelasticity and supramolecular dynamics of BTA hydrogel could influence cell behaviour compared to the traditional synthetic elastic hydrogel.
