Awarded in 2026
Home Department: Chemical Engineering
Faculty Advisors: Joseph DeSimone (Radiology and Chemical Engineering), Eric Shaqfeh (Chemical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering), and John MacArthur (Cardiothoracic Surgery)

Research Title: Additive Manufacturing of High-Resolution Porous Scaffolds for Synthetic Vascular Grafts

Patients needing bypass or dialysis surgery often require artificial replacement blood vessels, but small-diameter synthetic grafts frequently fail due to poor healing at the graft site. Inclusion of pores under 100 µm promote healing, yet existing methods are low-throughput and generate pores randomly. Vedika is using simulation and theory to develop scalable, high-resolution additive manufacturing techniques for viscous, elastomeric materials, and implanting the resulting scaffolds to establish design principles for porous architectures in next-generation vascular grafts.