Udaya Datla

Udaya received her Ph.D. from the Translational Biology, Medicine and Health program at Virginia Tech in 2022. Her dissertation work is highly interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on translating discoveries from bench-to-bedside. It involves aspects of microbial ecology, synthetic biology, computational modeling, host-pathogen dynamics, and microfabrication, mainly focused on 1) studying the acquired resistance in an engineered E. coli killer-prey microecology, and 2) quantifying the spatiotemporal dynamics of neutrophil extracellular trap release with a single-cell resolution in a combined infection-inflammation microsystem. Udaya is currently a postdoctoral research associate in the Regenerative Biomaterials and Therapeutics lab in the Biomedical engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University. Her responsibilities include utilizing biomaterials approaches to improve cell therapies for treating pulmonary fibrosis, specifically focusing on cystic fibrosis patients. Her work is focused on better understanding the shrink-wrapped cell engraftment into tight-junctioning lung epithelial cells.