Yoshida-Akimoto Lab

Aya Mizutani Akimoto received her Ph.D. degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences from Keio University, Japan in 2010. Her research as a student was conducted in collaboration with the Institute of Advanced BioMedical Engineering and Science, Tokyo Women’s Medical University, Japan. After her graduation, she did her postdoctoral research at the Bioengineering Laboratory, RIKEN, Japan as a Special Postdoctoral Researcher (SPDR) from 2010 to 2012. She then joined Prof. Ryo Yoshida’s laboratory in the Department of Materials Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Japan as a specially appointed assistant professor in 2012. Through the maternity and childcare leave from April to November 2012, she then promoted to assistant professor in 2013 and lecturer in 2015. After that, she took another maternity and childcare leave from February to June 2019 and during this leave, she was promoted to associate professor.

Her current research interest is “Hydrogel Surfaces”. Hydrogels are useful as cell/biological tissue culture materials that mimic the in vivo environment because they have properties such as elastic modulus and diffusivity similar to biological tissues. When cells/biological tissues are cultured using gels, contact points between cells/biological tissues and a gel material are interfaces composed of "microscopic and localized" polymer network and water. We are aiming to develop gel materials for the field of biotechnology based on the material engineering of gel surface/interface. Currently, we are focusing on the research to “design" and “evaluation” of gel surfaces, which has not been discussed systematically and quantitatively so far. We are modifying gel surfaces using a precision polymerization method and analyzing the structure-property relationship of gel surfaces using new analysis methods.