platelet-like particles will cure what ails you

Well, maybe that is overstating it.  However, PLPs, as we call them, are pretty cool.  This massive collaborative effort between Ashley Brown, Sarah Stabenfeldt, Tom Barker, Wilbur Lam, Nina Guzzetta, Alexander Alexeev, and yours truly was recently published online in Nature Materials.  I won’t rehash the whole paper here – you should go read it for yourself.  I will point out, however, that working on this stuff has been the most fun I have ever had in science.  The team that Tom Barker, Ashley Brown, and I assembled in our goal to replicate key aspects of platelet behavior has been a blast to work with, and I sincerely hope that we can continue to push forward on what I think is an exciting intersection between biology, mechanical engineering, hematology, and polymer chemistry & physics.