Accelerating Formulation Mixtures with Self-Driving Labs

Lecture Takeaways

The main takeaways are as follows:

• Robots are learning to formulate products, and they’re getting better at assisting human researchers.
• Our research makes tackling complex, real-world formulation challenges tractable for biomedical and industrial applications.

Biography

Dr. Frank Gu is Professor of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry at the University of Toronto, Co-Director of the Acceleration Consortium’s Self-Driving Lab for Formulation (SDL-5), and Director of the Institute for Water Innovation at UofT. His research group, the Mixture Lab, sits at the intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence, and formulation science, with a mission to automate the art of formulation discovery. The lab develops self-driving laboratory platforms that combine high-throughput robotic experimentation, computer vision, and machine learning to autonomously navigate complex multi-component formulation spaces. These platforms span the full formulation workflow, from rapid ingredient screening and microstructure characterization to autonomous synthesis and performance optimization, and have demonstrated order-of-magnitude improvements in formulation outcomes across personal care, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and water treatment. What distinguishes the Mixture Lab is its deep integration with industry R&D supporting product development teams. Frank is also the founder and Chairman of H2nanO, a water technology company commercializing solar-driven treatment systems for industrial wastewater.

No sign-up is required. For more information, contact the iBEST coordinator at ibest@torontomu.ca.

Engineering Porous Biomaterials for Minimally Invasive Medical Devices

Lecture Takeaways

The main takeaways are as follows:

1.  From research to real-world impact

• Learn how advanced biomaterials developed during my PhD and postdoctoral research are being translated into next-generation medical technologies.

2.  Wearable, minimally invasive health monitoring and drug delivery

• Discover how porous biomaterials can enable skin-interfacing devices (like microneedles) for continuous health monitoring and controlled drug delivery.

3.  New approaches for delivering drugs to the lungs

• Explore how engineered porous particles can improve how medications are delivered to the lungs, making treatments more effective and accessible.

Biography

Dr. Solmaz Karamikamkar is an Assistant Professor in The Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her research focuses on designing porous biomaterials for minimally invasive medical devices, including microneedle-based systems, wearable drug delivery platforms, and inhalable particles for lung therapeutics. She received her PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Toronto and completed her postdoctoral training at the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation (TIBI). She also brings nearly five years of industry experience in medical device development, spanning fabrication to industrial-scale production. Her work bridges materials engineering, manufacturing, and patient-centered healthcare technologies.

No sign-up is required. For more information, contact the iBEST coordinator at ibest@torontomu.ca.

MRI for Ventricular Arrhythmia Management

Lecture Takeaways

The main takeaways are as follows:

• Ventricular arrhythmias are a leading cause of sudden cardiac death. Implantable cardiac defibrillators can improve outcomes, while arrhythmia substrate ablation is potentially curative but remains associated with high recurrence rates.
• MRI has demonstrated promise in characterizing arrhythmia substrates, better identifying those at increased risk for events and determining targets for ablative therapies.
• MRI can also effectively delineate ablation lesions, providing the potential to better assess treatment efficacy acutely.

Biography

Dr. Graham A. Wright, PhD, is a Senior Scientist at Sunnybrook Research Institute, a Professor in the Department of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto, and the Canada Research Chair in Imaging for Cardiovascular Therapeutics.

The research focus of Dr. Wright’s group is cardiovascular imaging, with an emphasis on MRI. This effort includes basic biophysics to characterize the relationship between MR signals and underlying pathophysiology in blood and tissue; engineering to develop more effective methods and devices to acquire, analyze, and visualize medical images; and application of these tools to assessment, treatment planning, and therapy guidance in ischemic and structural heart diseases, complex arrhythmias, and peripheral vascular diseases.

Together with trainees and collaborators, he has published over 235 peer-reviewed papers and 545 conference abstracts, which have garnered numerous awards and resulted in 25 patents. Dr. Wright collaborates with a broad range of companies in translating research results toward clinical practice.

No sign-up is required. For more information, contact the iBEST coordinator at ibest@torontomu.ca.

Bio-Interfaced Soft Materials for Point-of-Care and Personalized Medicine

Lecture Takeaways

The main takeaways are as follows:

• Next-generation wearable and implantable devices can monitor health continuously and in real time. Advances in bio-interfaced materials are enabling new technologies that track vital health signals and support early diagnosis and personalized care.
  
• Research in soft bio-interfaced materials is accelerating the translation of lab discoveries into real-world healthcare solutions and translational medicine. By bridging engineering, materials science, and medicine, these innovations are moving closer to clinical and everyday use.he current technological gaps

Biography

Dr. Shaghayegh Shajari is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical, Industrial, and Mechatronics Engineering at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) and affiliated with iBEST (St. Michael’s Hospital/Unity Health). She earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering from the University of Calgary, developing smart polymer-based soft materials and nanomaterials for wearable health monitoring and flexible electronics, recognized with major awards and honours including the Alberta Innovates Technology Futures Award, Eyes High, Dean’s Scholarship and the Graduate Citizenship Award. She held postdoctoral fellowships at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute (Brain CREATE) and Northwestern University’s Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics (NSERC postdoctoral fellowship, Prof. John A. Rogers), advancing wearable microfluidics, biosensors, and implantable drug delivery devices. She also conducted research at UCLA on bioadhesive skin interfaces and soft actuators for Braille displays. Her work has led to patents, numerous peer-review publications and journal cover features, and leadership roles, including Associate Editor for Frontiers in Sensors and cohort leader in the WISE Planet LEAP program and previously President of Mechanical Engineering Graduate Student Association (MEGSA).Dr. Shajari’s research integrates smart bio-interfacing materials with translational biomedical device technologies, promoting a shift from centralized clinical diagnostics to personalized and precision medicine.

No sign-up is required. For more information, contact the iBEST coordinator at ibest@torontomu.ca.

Electrochemical and Functional Nucleic Acids – Key Tools for Next-generation Biosensing

Lecture Takeaways

The main takeaways are as follows:

• The need for frequent monitoring of biomarkers
• The current technological gaps
• How functional nucleic acids and electrochemistry can help

Biography

Dr. Soleymani is a professor at McMaster University. She is dedicated to enhancing human life through innovations in personalized medicine that bridge the fields of engineering, science, and medicine. Her current research focuses on the development of next-generation biological sensors and wearable technologies aimed at improving the understanding and management of health and disease. Dr. Soleymani places a strong emphasis on translational research; she has successfully licensed several technologies to diagnostic companies and founded two startup companies, FendX Technologies and Aptec Health, that concentrate on commercialization of engineered surfaces for reducing the spread of infection and wearable protein monitoring technologies, respectively. Her contributions to the field have earned her recognition as a Dorothy Killam Fellow, a University Scholar, a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Miniaturized Biomedical Devices, and a member of the Royal Society of Canada (New College of Scholars, Artists, and Scientists).

No sign-up is required. For more information, contact the iBEST coordinator at ibest@torontomu.ca.

Heart Regeneration with Human Pluripotent Stem Cells

Lecture Takeaways

The main takeaways are as follows:

• Recent developments in the large-scale manufacturing of human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hPSC-CMs) and their testing in small- and large-animal models of myocardial infarction
• Evidence that maturation of hPSC-CMs prior to transplantation mediates better outcomes in terms of myocardial structure, contractile efficacy, and safety

Biography

Dr. Michael Laflamme is the Robert McEwen Chair in Cardiac Regenerative Medicine, Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Cardiovascular Regenerative Medicine, Senior Scientist in the McEwen Stem Cell Institute at the University Health Network (UHN), and Professor of Laboratory Medicine & Pathobiology at the University of Toronto. He leads a research program that is focused on developing novel cardiac cell therapies based on human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), and his laboratory has made a number of important contributions in this area including efficient protocols to guide hPSCs into cardiomyocytes, proof-of-concept transplantation studies with hPSC-derived cardiomyocytes in preclinical models, and the first direct demonstration that hPSC-derived cardiomyocytes can become electrically integrated and activate synchronously with host myocardium in injured hearts. Dr. Laflamme has been the recipient of honours including the Society for Cardiovascular Pathology Young Investigator Award, the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy Outstanding New Investigator Award, and the UHN Inventor of the Year. Dr. Laflamme is a founding investigator of BlueRock Therapeutics, and he also practiced cardiovascular and autopsy pathology for over two decades.

No sign-up is required. For more information, contact the iBEST coordinator at ibest@torontomu.ca.

Challenges and Opportunities of Human 7 Tesla MRI for Clinical Research

Lecture Takeaways

The main takeaways are as follows:

• Game changer for clinical research in MRI using ultra-high magnetic field strength
• Technical and data analysis challenges in MRI and solutions

Biography

Dr. Uludag studied Physics at the Technical University of Berlin and completed his Ph.D. in Medical Physics on Near-Infrared Optical Spectroscopy (Humboldt University, Berlin), and moved for a postdoc position to the Center for Functional MRI (UCSD, San Diego, USA) to work on the physiological and physical basis of functional MRI. Then, he was appointed Head of Human Brain Imaging group at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen. From June 2010 to December 2018, he was an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Psychology & Neuroscience and was Head of the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience (from 2013-2016), continuing his work on the basis of fMRI and studying cognition in the human brain utilizing the new Ultra-High Field human MRI scanners (7 and 9.4 Tesla). Since January 2019, he has been a Senior Scientist at the University Health Network, and since May 2019, he has been a Full Professor at the Department of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto. Recently, he was appointed to be the Inaugural Scientific Director of the 7T located at the Sunnybrook Research Institute, Senior Fellow of the ISMRM and Canada Research Chair, Tier 1.

No sign-up is required. For more information, contact the iBEST coordinator at ibest@torontomu.ca.

No sign-up is required. For more information, contact the iBEST coordinator at ibest@torontomu.ca.

Opening and Closing Blood Vessels with Ultrasound Induced Cavitation

Lecture Takeaways

The main takeaways are as follows:

• Ultrasound in combination with cavitation seeds can induce microvascular shutdown and a range of therapeutically bioeffects. Cancer related applications are an important target for this approach.
• Ultrasound has the potential to be employed to resolve large vessel occlusions that occur in the context of stroke, pulmonary embolisms and deep venous thrombosis. Catheter based approaches to achieve this are undergoing rapid development.

Biography

David Goertz is a Senior Scientist at the Sunnybrook Research Institute and Professor of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto. Dr Goertz’s interdisciplinary research program is primarily focused on the development of cavitation-based ultrasound therapy techniques. One application area of interest is exploiting cavitation induced bioeffects to treat cancer, a second is the development of new approaches and devices to resolve thrombotic or chronic large vessel occlusions.

No sign-up is required. For more information, contact the iBEST coordinator at ibest@torontomu.ca.

Biointerfacing Polymer Materials for Sensing and Drug Delivery

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.