Seyma Bektas Tercan

PhD Candidate

Seyma received her Bachelor’s degree in bioengineering from Ege University, Turkey. During her bachelor thesis project, she designed chitosan and alginate hydrogels as a bioink for 3D bioprinting.
After graduation, she started her master’s degree at the Bioengineering Department of Hacettepe University, Turkey where she completed her master thesis on the topic of the development of liver-on-chip with spheroid loaded ECM-mimetic peptide amphiphile hydrogels. She participated in a number of research projects at Gumusderelioğlu’s Lab (Hacettepe University Cell and Tissue Engineering Research Group). She learnt a lot about the development of a novel perfusion bioreactor and the determination of operational parameters of this system to enhance in vitro performance of scaffolds for bone tissue engineering. She also learnt scaffold production methods, preparation, and optimization of the hydrogel using different crosslink mechanisms, and characterization of hydrogel and polymer for tissue engineering application. During this time, she visited RWTH Aachen University as a visiting scholar for four months. She designed a thiol–ene hydrogel formed by the reaction of norbornene-functionalized gelatin and thiol-functionalized hyaluronic acid to provide cellular microenvironment at Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology, Germany.

In 2018, she was awarded a Ph.D. scholarship by the Turkish Ministry of Education. Her research interest in organ on chip development led her to start her Ph.D. in the Loskill-Lab at the University of Tübingen to study choroid on chip for modeling neovascular age-related macular degeneration.