Christine Schmidt: Pioneering Regenerative Neural Tissue Engineering

Today’s guest is Christine Schmidt who is a University of Florida faculty member and former department share who works in regenerative neural tissue engineering.

Top 3 Takeaways:

• "We're trying to create scaffolds that can be templates for the body to repair itself, to grow around, and ultimately become natural tissue, seamlessly integrating with the body's own."
• "Other faculty were discouraging. This is because academia tends to prioritize scholarly pursuits such as papers and grants, often undervaluing applied work and its real-world applications."
•  "Our clinical collaborator actively participated in the lab alongside Sarah. Together, they would work on batches, with Sarah creating formulations and providing immediate feedback based on the tactile experience. The collaborator would discern whether a material was suitable for surgical use, offering invaluable insights into the practicalities surgeons face."

0:45 Can you introduce yourself better than I just did?

1:15 What is tissue engineering?

5:00 How did you get into this?

8:30 By focusing on entrepreneurial endeavors you were at risk of not getting tenure, how did you still get it?

14:15 Which was more useful for your career, entrepreneurial or academic?

16:45 How was your technology licensed?

 22:15 Do you want to talk about your other startup, Alafare?

32:30 You then moved to Florida and then eventually became department chair, why did you do that?

36:45 How did you do the department chair and research at the same time?

37:45 Is there anything else that we didn’t talk about that you wanted to mention?