Lucas Polo da Fonseca
Bio
Lucas started his research career as an undergraduate researcher in the group of professor Dr. Maria Isabel Felisberti at University of Campinas in December 2012, in the first year of his studies of bachelor’s degree on chemistry. His first undergraduate fellowship (FAPESP) was granted in August 2013. Under his undergraduate research period with Dr. Felisberti as advisor, Lucas was granted fellowships of FAPESP, CNPq, or CAPES, and developed extensive research on polyurethanes, polymer synthesis, and polymer/colloid physical chemistry, producing 2 papers as first author. He then joined the group of professor Felisberti as a Ph.D. student in August 2017 with a CAPES fellowship, with a challenging primary project of developing a controlled polymerization route for polyurethanes. As secondary projects, Lucas continued working with polymer colloids for the purpose of bioapplications. Both primary and secondary projects combined yielded Lucas 6 scientific publications as first author, and 1 as co-author, in well recognized peer-reviewed international journals, and 1 granted Brazilian patent. Today, Lucas conducted research on improving the synthetic routes developed in his Ph.D., developing new controlled synthetic routes for polyurethanes, and applying those routes together with additive manufacturing for the purpose of developing advanced biomaterials for drug delivery/tissue engineering.
Project
Additive manufacturing (3D-printing) technologies are of great interest to the field of biomaterials due to the possibility of producing materials of distinct shapes with high resolution. However, often human tissue presents several levels of structural organization, in the macroscopic, microscopic, and nanoscopic range. As one of the materials with highly tunable rheological/mechanical properties in the form of hydrogels, polyurethanes are very promising for tissue-engineering, however, due to the lack of control over their polymerization, the control over micro/nanostructure is impossible. Therefore, this project has the goal of first developing a controlled polymerization route for polyurethanes, starting from previous developments achieved by Dr. Lucas in his Ph.D. studies. With the development of these new synthetic routes, stimuli-responsive (4D-printed) PU hydrogel-based scaffolds with precise control over micro/nanostructure will be produced for use as biomaterials. Additionally, the influence of micro/nanostructure on the performance of such biomaterials will be addressed.