My Research Project- Lauren Hesse

My research focuses on developing tissue engineering scaffolds as non-invasive tools to surveil and modulate the immune system in pregnancy in an attempt to prevent pregnancy complications. Women with pregnancy complications are 2x more likely to have childbirth complications, which can be dangerous to mother and baby, so our work aims to shed light on ways to predict/prevent those complications. I have a large role in this project from both an experimental design and a manuscript authorship standpoint, which means in order to ensure this research and our writing is not plagiarized, I need to cite any and all sources from which I drew inspiration and come up with novel modifications to answer new questions. From an ethical standpoint, we do work in a bit of a fuzzy area as we are doing studies on pregnant mice who obviously cannot consent to any procedure. However, we hold ourselves to a high standard of animal care and minimize discomfort as best we can while adhering to all IACUC guidelines.