2025 Program

Kristy Ainslie, Ph.D.

Fred Eshelman Distinguished Professor and Chair, Division Pharmacoengineering & Molecular Pharmaceutics
Professor, UNC Department of Biomedical Engineering, UNC Department of Microbiology and Immunology

Kristy Ainslie, Ph. D., applies her knowledge base in biomaterials and immunology to develop new immune-modulatory therapies that treat and prevent infectious and autoimmune diseases. Her lab aims to design practical and innovative formulations, taking into account scalable production and applications in developing nations.

She has several research areas of interest, including the development of new polymers for vaccines, formulation of antigen-specific therapies to treat autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and type 1 diabetes, host-directed therapies for treatment of multi-drug-resistant infections, electrospun scaffolds for glioblastoma treatment, and electrospray for fabrication of immune-targeting microparticles.

Originally from Michigan, she received her bachelor of science in chemical engineering from Michigan State University and then earned both her master’s and Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Pennsylvania State University. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at San Francisco. Additionally, Dr. Ainslie has been awarded the Controlled Release Society’s Outstanding Oral Drug Delivery Award in 2007 and 2009. She joined the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy in 2014 as an associate professor in the Division of Pharmacoengineering and Molecular Pharmaceutics. Prior to that, she spent almost five years as an assistant professor at the Ohio State University’s Division of Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Chemistry.

To learn more about Dr. Ainslie, visit: Kristy Ainslie, Ph.D.

Sarah Shelton, PhD

Assistant Professor
Lampe Joint Department of Biomedical
Engineering, NC State and UNC Chapel Hil

Dr. Shelton’s lab designs microfluidic, organ-on-chip models of disease to uncover how the tissue microenvironment and cellular interactions shape pathology and treatment response. We use biological, engineering and imaging tools to study the transport and function of cells within 3D, engineered in vitro systems that mimic specific tissues. One area of focus is determining how different components of the immune microenvironment in cancer interact in ways that may drive disease progression or response to therapy. This work includes generating vascularized micro-tissues using cells and tissues from patients for personalized medicine and to design novel in vitro assays for assessing immunotherapy efficacy. Building microfluidic models of vascular beds also allows us to observe interactions between circulating cells and the surrounding tissue, including the process of metastasis, and we are exploring how components of the coagulation cascade may influence metastatic outcomes. As part of the “Translational Predictive Biology” cluster in the Comparative Medicine Institute, we enjoy collaborating with scientists and engineers across the spectrums of health and disease research, length and time scales and bench-to-bedside translation.