Mr. Dhruv Bhattaram is a Predoctoral Researcher in the lab of Dr. Xi Ren in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his BS and MS in Biomedical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Since starting his graduate research, Dhruv has been studying the theragnostic and biorobotic applications of the lung airway epithelium, leveraging multiciliated cells to propel a burgeoning class of stem cells models known as apical-out airway organoids (AoAOs). These AoAOs leveraging the continuous, coordinated beating of motile cilia to transduce ciliary activity on the nanometer scale into micron-scale, whole-organoid locomotion, serving as either building blocks for more complex machinery or as markers of tissue health.

For his talk, Dhruv will focus on his recent work in combining healthy stem cell spheroids with spheroids derived from CCDC39-mutated patients to develop biorobots of asymmetric thrust profile, serving as a first step to exerting full control of Aggregated CiliaBot (AggreBot) motility.