Biointerfacing Polymer Materials for Sensing and Drug Delivery
Dr. Caitlin Maikawa
Associate Professor at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto
Date: Friday, October 3rd, 2025
Time: 1–2 p.m. EDT
Host: Dr. Eno Hysi
Location: In-person and virtual
LKS Auditorium – 209 Victoria Street, and via Zoom
Lecture Takeaways
The main takeaways are as follows:
- Polymers are highly tunable and can be designed to interface with biomarkers of disease in the body.
- Polymers can be used to engineer simple polymer-based biosensors
- Polymer design can also be used to understand how mucoadhesive properties change in inflamed environments
Biography
Dr. Caitlin Maikawa’s research focuses on engineering dynamic polymer materials for drug delivery and biosensing applications. After receiving a BASc in Chemical Engineering at the University of Toronto, she completed her PhD at Stanford University in Bioengineering under the guidance of Eric Appel. Dr. Maikawa then joined the Brigham and Women’s Hospital as a Schmidt Science Fellow with Jeffrey Karp and Yuhan Lee where she engineered devices for drug delivery and sensing in the gastrointestinal tract.
In 2023, she joined the University of Toronto’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Maikawa also holds a cross-appointment in the Department of Chemistry and is a member of the Acceleration Consortium. Her group continues to focus on how to modulate the properties of polymer materials for applications in chronic diseases like inflammatory bowel disease.
No sign-up is required. For more information, contact the iBEST coordinator at ibest@torontomu.ca.
