Bio

In 1995 California-born Chad completed a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. During his undergraduate studies he interned at NASA Johnson Space Center for a year. After graduation he worked as a professional hardware and software consultant with a National Instruments Alliance Member, VI Technology, Inc. He then began graduate studies in Arizona State University, where he has earned both an M.S. and PhD in Bioengineering, and is currently working as a Post Doc. In the summer of 2002 he completed IEEE summer school training in biocomplexity analysis and signal processing at Dartmouth. He maintains his LabVIEW programming skills to incorporate bioreactor automation and biosignal processing into his research. His specific interests include tissue engineering, bioreactor design, experiment and analysis automation, microgravity and environmental interactions with the biology, and complexity applications and modeling in tissue constructs. Current projects focus on manipulating vascular smooth muscle cell behavior to reduce cell migration toward preventing post-surgical intimal hyperplasia in vasculature. Other projects involve use of complex adaptive system modeling of cell populations to understand cell-matrix interactions and emergent structures. In addition, he is utilizing simple-rule principles to generate 3D complex tissue patterns to be used as templates for rapid prototyping of tissue constructs for research and clinical applications.

Project: Complex 3D Branching Structure Generation, Analysis and Comparison to Physiological Structure for Tissue Engineering Application

For tissue engineering and cell therapeutics to become a reality, the diffusion limitation of nutrients to implanted cells and tissues needs to be overcome. In addition, the complexity of certain structures, such as the liver, have rendered traditional approaches very limited. Therefore, the purpose of this project is to generate classes of three-dimensional branching structures using rule based L-systems, create a method of morphological analysis and compare the morphological indices to that of physiological branching structures. These structures would serve as templates to build living complex constructs using rapid tissue prototyping technologies developed in parallel. In addition, patterns can be fabricated via traditional rapid prototyping techniques at a much larger scale as instructional tools for microanatomy and physiology.

Favorite Three-Color Cellular Automaton

Rule Chosen: 789123456

Reason: Some interesting features to this rule are a random looking pattern on the right side while the left border the pattern appears repeating. The most interesting feature is the appearance of a third repeating area between the other two that is not evident when only running 200 iterations. Therefore, a 500 iteration graph was run.

Additional Information

Kennedy, C. “Complex 3D Branching Structure Generation, Analysis and Comparison to Physiological Structure for Tissue Engineering Application.” Presentation at NKS 2004, Boston, MA, 2004. [abstract]