Dr. Alice Stanton is working to get better disease treatments through new approaches to drug discovery, particularly for neurological diseases. She is currently a Senior Postdoctoral Associate at MIT. Alice was named a Rising Star in Engineering in Health by Johns Hopkins and Columbia University and a Rising Star in Chemical Engineering by MIT. She received her PhD in Bioengineering from Stanford University and BSE in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University. She is the recipient of the NIA Research and Entrepreneurial Development Immersion Fellowship, NIA Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowship, and Kavanaugh Fellowship.

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She invented the Neuromatrix brain-mimetic biomaterial enabling enhanced brain modeling to establish the first patient-specific preclinical brain model that includes all the major brain cell types, the miBrain, with integrated BBB, neurovascular units, myelinated neuronal networks, and microglial immune cells in 3D tissue-like architecture. She has developed and characterized the miBrain, demonstrating similarities in response compared to those of the human brain, and harnessed it to probe Alzheimer's Disease-associated mechanisms, revealing a crosstalk between microglia and astrocytes underlying neuronal tau phosphorylation in the context of APOE4. She developed the GelChip microfluidic platform to enable the perfusion through the vessels of the miBrain, forming a miBrain-on-Chip to model delivery to the brain.

 

She has trained with Robert Langer and Li-Huei Tsai at MIT, Marc Tessier-Lavigne at Rockefeller University, and in the department of Biochemical and Cellular Pharmacology at Genentech. She is a speaker on her research, design thinking, women in STEM, navigation of careers and education, and leadership and personal skills development. She loves talking to ambitious young women and passionate start up founders.