Landon Teer is a PhD student in the Chen Mechanobiology Lab in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Louisville. His research interests include investigating the mechanobiological drivers of disease progression for glioblastoma invasion and immunosuppression. He obtained his BS from the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Mississippi State University, where he worked in the lab of Lauren Priddy and studied biomaterial design and optimization for the healing of traumatic bone injuries.

Kavitha Yaddanapudi received her M.S. from Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai, India, in 1998, and she received her Ph.D. in Immunology from the Indian Institute of Science in 2004. She completed her post-doctoral fellowship at Columbia University, New York. Dr. Yaddanapudi became an Assistant Professor in 2012 at the Brown Cancer Center (BCC)/Department of Medicine, University of Louisville (UofL). Since then, she has developed an active research program in the field of cancer immunology. In 2020, she became an Associate Professor in the Division of Immunotherapy, Hiram C Polk, Jr MD, Department of Surgery, UofL. In August 2021, she was appointed to the Henry Vogt Chair in Immuno-Oncology. Dr. Yaddanapudi’s research program focuses on different approaches that tumors use to suppress the immune system, and on the development of novel immune-based strategies for the treatment of cancer.

Joseph Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Louisville. His research interests include investigating the mechanobiological drivers of disease progression, with a focus on neurodegeneration and glioblastoma invasion. His lab leverages tools from the fields of biomaterials, biomechanics, and gene editing to tease out the underlying mechanobiological pathways in disease. He received his BS and MS from the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Mississippi State University, where he worked in the lab of Jun Liao and studied valvular biomechanics and tissue engineering. He then earned his PhD in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University, where he studied the impact of mechanical strain on the progression of aortic valve disease in the lab of W. David Merryman. Prior to arriving at Louisville, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Sanjay Kumar at the University of California, Berkeley. His postdoctoral work focused on investigating the impact of cytoskeletal regulators in glioblastoma invasion and elucidating the underlying mechanisms that drive mesenchymal shifting in glioblastoma.