Chemical engineering professor honored for work on plant-based tissue scaffolds

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Amir Sheikhi, the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Early Career Chair in Biomaterials and Regenerative Engineering and associate professor of chemical engineering at Penn State, recently received the 2025 Early Career Investigator Award from the journal BioResources. The award recognized a paper published by Sheikhi and his research team in 2026, titled “All-Cellulose Cryogels with Tunable Extracellular Matrix-MimeticArchitecture.”

BioResources is a peer-reviewed open-access journal focused on lignocellulosic materials, structural components of plant biomass that are produced during photosynthesis. The journal’s Early Career Investigator Award “recognizes novel, impactful and captivating research from early career scientists in any experimental or theoretical frameworks related to lignocellulosic materials, chemicals and applications for new uses and new capabilities.” It is awarded annually in recognition of proposed or recently completed research submitted around the end of the previous calendar year.

Tissues grown in the lab require scaffolds that mimic the networks of proteins, minerals and other molecules connecting cells to their surroundings. These networks, known as extracellular matrices (ECM), contain numerous microscopic pores that vary in size and organization depending on tissue type, a property that has been challenging to replicate sustainably.

Sheikhi’s team explored the potential of cellulose derivatives to form ECM-like architectures. Cellulose is a type of carbohydrate valued for its abundance in nature, high tensile strength and dose-dependent biocompatibility, and it can undergo a wide range of chemical modifications, allowing for minute adjustments to scaffold properties.

“We found that scaffold architecture could be programmed by selecting specific cellulose building blocks, which creates a potential pathway toward biomaterials tailored for different tissue engineering applications,” said Sheikhi, who is also affiliated with the Departments of Biomedical Engineering, of Chemistry and of Neurosurgery.

For the awarded paper, Sheikhi’s team used cellulose derivatives with different combinations of attached functional groups to synthesize cryogels, porous structures formed when cross-linked polymers are treated at low temperatures. Among these derivatives were hairy cellulose nanocrystals, which have an especially high capacity for interactions with other materials due to the versatile, flexible “hair-like” cellulose chains extending from their rigid crystalline core.

The researchers found that the composition of the cryogels had a significant effect on the resulting architecture. Materials containing hairy cellulose nanocrystals formed cryogels that were less dense and more porous compared to those formed with other cellulosic materials. In total, the synthesized cryogels exhibited various pore morphologies and collectively mimicked several types of ECM found throughout the body, including the ECM of muscle, bone, adipose, liver, kidney and brain tissue.

“Our results demonstrated that modifications to cellulose could be translated from the molecular and nanoscale levels into 3D scaffolds with tissue-relevant architectures,” Sheikhi said. “Rather than developing only one formulation, we established a broader design framework connecting cellulose chemistry, particle structure, network assembly and final pore features.”

Sheikhi said his team aims to build on this research and measure the mechanical properties, interconnectivity and stability of all-cellulose cryogels under physiological conditions. Cellulosic biomaterials could be especially useful inareas like regenerative medicine, soft robotics and New Approach Methodologies, which assess drug safety and efficacy while reducing reliance on animal testing, according to Sheikhi.

“This work was highly collaborative among my mentees,” Sheikhi said. "It brought together researchers at multiple career stages, spanning from undergraduate students to doctoral students to postdoctoral researchers. I’m looking forward to exploring this platform under different conditions and across other biomedical applications.”

Other co-authors on the awarded paper include the following collaborators:

• Lucas Lawrence Franz, a doctoral candidate in chemical engineering
• Karolina Patricia Akelaitis, who received her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Penn State
• Neela Nicole Cooper, a rising fourth-year undergraduate student majoring in chemical engineering
• Sina Kheirabadi, a doctoral candidate in chemical engineering
• Mica L. Pitcher, who received her doctorate in chemistry from Penn State
• Jeff Lin, who received his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Penn State
• Mitra Ann Salari, a rising fourth-year undergraduate student majoring in chemical engineering
• Anjali Kiran Baikerikar, who received her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Penn State
• Suchitra Thirumalai, a rising fourth-year undergraduate student majoring in chemical engineering
• Roya Koshani, a postdoctoral scholar of chemical engineering

The work in the recognized paper was supported by the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Early Career Chair, as well as the Penn State College of Engineering Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, which was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation under award number 1950639. This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the funders.