Dr. Laura Rijns was born in the Netherlands (Nov 10, 1996) and is currently a postdoc as Niels Stensen Fellow at Stanford University with prof. Zhenan Bao in close collaboration with prof. Karl Deisseroth, focussed on improving the communication between electronic materials and living tissue.   

Laura obtained her PhD (2023) in Biomedical Engineering “cum laude” from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) with prof. Patricia Dankers and prof. E.W. (Bert) Meijer. Supramolecular hydrogels as mimics of the extracellular matrix were developed for cell and organoid culture. Design rules are proposed that control cell-material interactions, useful to culture complex living tissue fully controlled and synthetically, for drug screening or tissue replacement applications. She was awarded the Materials-Driven Regeneration Young Talent Award 2021, Best PhD Thesis Award of the Department of Biomedical Engineering of TU/e 2024 and the ACS Global Outstanding Student & Mentor Award in Polymer Science and Engineering 2024.

Prior to graduate school, Laura received her BSc (2017) and MSc (2019) in Biomedical Engineering at TU/e in the lab of prof. E.W. (Bert) Meijer, focused on supramolecular assemblies. During her undergraduate studies, she was the Lab Captain of the iGEM TU/e 2016 team, studying regulatable scaffold proteins. In 2017, she worked at UC Santa Barbara in the group of prof. Songi Han, studying liquid-liquid phase separated coacervate polymers. In 2019 and 2023, she worked at EPFL (Switzerland) with prof. Maartje Bastings, studying multivalent interactions using DNA origami.