Since 2017, my lab is in the brand-new Engineering & Education Resource center at the heart of UT Austin's engineering campus. In our new 1,200 sqft lab we have established a versatile and well-equipped laboratory for mechanical, optical, and histological characterization of biological soft tissues. Our lab is BSL-2 certified. We also have prototyping and aseptic cell culture capabilities. I am happy to discuss sharing resources with interested academic and/or industry partners. In addition to below resources, we have access to shared facilities on campus and off campus that give us direct access to SEM, MRI, micro-CT, 2-Photon Microscopy, and many more resources.

Mechanical Test Equipment

  • CellScale Biotester - Biaxial test device with heated fluid bath, 2D digital image correlation capabilities, and load cells ranging from 1.5 to 23N

  • Instron 5943 - Single column uniaxial tensile test device (up to 1kN)

  • CellScale Univert - Single column uniaxial tensile test device (up to 200N) with heated fluid bath, 2D digital image correlation capabilities, and load cells ranging from 1N to 200N

  • Custom Bulge Test Device - For 2.5" diameter samples: syringe pump controlled with 3D digital image correlation capabilities for extracting sample kinematics

  • Piuma Nanoindenter - Nanoindentation device to characterize micro-mechanical properties of soft materials with a force range of 20 pN to 2 mN, and a Young’s modulus range of 5 Pa to 1 GPa

  • TekScan Pressure Sensor - Capacitive pressure sensor system

Design Equipment

  • Formlabs Form 2 - 3D SLA printer with washing and curing station

  • NextEngine Ultra HD - 3D scanner with mutlidrive

  • Ultimaker 3 - 3D FDM printer with dual extrusion

Optical Test Equipment

  • Olympus BX 53 - Fluorescent microscope with 4-40x objectives and LED illuminator

  • Olympus CKX53 - Inverted phase contrast microscope

  • Olympus SZ61 - Upright dissection microscope

  • Thorlabs Telesto OCT - Spectral domain OCT system with 1300nm central bandwidth and axial resolution of 5.5um

General Lab Equipment

  • 8C/-4C/-80 freezers

  • Standard/CO2 Incubators

  • Wet lab equipment (pipette systems, analytical scales, etc.)

  • Biosafety Cabinet

  • Centrifuge

  • Peristaltic pump

  • Heated water circulator

Histology Equipment

  • Leica RM2030 microtome (low-profile blades)

  • Tissue float bath

  • Slide warmer

  • Paraffin embedding station (dispenser, vacuum oven, cassettes, etc.)

  • Staining dishes, reagents, and accessories

    • Hematoxylin & Eosin

    • Masson’s Trichrome

    • Movat Pentachrome

    • Picrosirius Red

Computers & Software

  • 11 Dell Optiplex with SSD drives and i5/i7 CPUs

  • 3 Dell Precision Towers with i7/Xeon E3/Xeon E5 CPUs + NVIDIA QUADRO/AMD Fire Pro GPUs

  • 2 Dell Precision Towers with 18 CPUs (Xeon E5) + 2 NVIDIA QUADRO GPUs

  • Licenses for SolidWorks (computer-aided design), GOM (digital image correlation), Abaqus (nonlinear finite element analysis), Cubit (meshing)