Students get involved
P
hD students June Park and Amy Rochford won first prize in the Wolfson Enterprise Competition in May for their start-up Lecta, which is developing bio-fabricated regenerative flexible electronics for neural interfaces.
Wolfson Enterprise Competition winners Amy Rochford (left) and June Park first started thinking about Lecta over dinner at King’s College (background).
J
une, a Gates Cambridge Scholar and NanoDTC Associate, is in the third year of her PhD in the Scherman group and received her BSc in Chemical and Biological Engineering from MIT. Her work involves designing viscoelastic supramolecular hydrogels for stem cells, specifically for cell therapy. Amy, who is in the third year of her EPSRC DTP PhD in the Department of Engineering, studied Biomedical Science as an undergraduate and holds a Master’s in Regenerative Medicine and Nanotechnology. Her
research involves bio-hybrid technologies, which combine living cells with flexible electronics. June and Amy, who are both at King’s, explain how they got the idea for Lecta over a college dinner: “We were discussing a day in the lab plagued by slippery bioelectronic device surfaces,” says Amy. “I was having a problem with my research and I needed the assistance of a chemist to help me with sticking hydrogels to flexible electronics.”
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