People | Stabenfeldt Lab

Dr. Sarah Stabenfeldt (PI)

Primary Investigator

Each year in the United States over 1 million individuals will experience a traumatic or ischemic-related brain injury, with 350,000 persons sustaining a severe to moderate traumatic brain injury (TBI) and an additional 800,000 people suffering from stroke. While the inherent regenerative potential of nervous tissue has been realized, the hurdles and barriers formed by scar and inhibitory molecules limit endogenous regeneration and repair. In evaluating current clinical therapies, there is an obvious need for improving diagnostic imaging and in turn targeted delivery of therapeutics to injured or ischemic tissue. Sarah Stabenfeldt focuses on (1) engineering novel targeted diagnostic and therapeutic (‘theranostic’) biomaterials for neural injury/disease and (2) identifying endogenous neural stem cell homing mechanisms after injury and incorporating such biosignals into tissue-engineered matrices

Research areas of interest: Regenerative medicine, biomaterials, neural injury and repair, neural tissue engineering

Professional preparation: FIRST Postdoctoral Fellow, The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Emory University School of Medicine, Georgia Institute of Technology (2007-2010) Ph.D., bioengineering, Georgia Institute of Technology 2007 B.S., biomedical engineering, Saint Louis University 2002

Dr. George "Reed" Bjorklund

Post Doctoral Researcher

Reed owned and operated a precision aerospace manufacturing business before selling it to return to earn a formal degree from Arizona State University. Reed earned his PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the School of Life Sciences after successfully defending his graduate thesis, “ERK/MAPK Requirements for the Development of Long-Range Axonal Projections and Motor Learning in Cortical Glutamatergic Neurons,”

Briana Martinez

PhD Candidate

Kassondra Hickey

PhD Candidate

Kassy first pursued her interests in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine by earning her bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She then went on to work for Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. She continues to work on regenerative strategies in the Stabenfeldt lab, focusing on traumatic brain injury repair through biomaterial drug delivery & stem cell recruitment.