Dr. Menekse Ermis

Dr. Menekse Ermis is an academic researcher and postdoctoral research fellow at the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation (TIBI), LA, USA under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ali Khademhosseini. She received her M.D. from Hacettepe University, School of Medicine (2009), and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering (Biomaterials Track) from Middle East Technical University (METU) (2016). Her Ph.D. thesis was a close collaboration between METU and Stanford University and was mentored by Prof. Dr. Vasif Hasirci and Prof. Dr. Utkan Demirci, respectively. In her Ph.D. thesis, she explored surface stiffness and polyester modifications on cancer cell behavior and detection. She was a visiting researcher at Canary Center at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection in 2015 for her thesis research. She has worked as a microscopy specialist (CLSM, SEM, AFM) for materials characterization in METU Center of Excellence in Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering (BIOMATEN). She was a visiting scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Casali Institute of Applied Chemistry, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Daniel Cohn on responsive polymer synthesis and 3D printing (2017). She is currently interested in micro and nano surface modifications in relation to cell-surface interactions, cross-linkable hydrogel synthesis and 3D printing, and their use in microfluidics for tissue and disease models. She aims to develop biomaterials that will serve as cell carriers to mimic biological tissues in vitro and their integration into microfluidic systems for high-throughput screening and analysis.