Congratulations to Lauren Brown, who defended her Ph.D. work “Engineering Fluidic Tools for Translational Science: Developing In Vitro Tissues and Remote Sampling Platforms” on October 3, 2025. Lauren was a student in Professor Ashleigh Theberge’s research group where she worked on two different analytical chemistry projects focused on translational applications for human health. Her first project was on developing mini tissues in the lab for studying tissue junctions and disease interfaces, where she modeled fibrotic regions in engineered heart tissues, modeled a bone-ligament junction in periodontal tissue, and studied facioscapulohumeral dystrophy, a type of muscular dystrophy. This project was successful due to the large collaboration effort between other departments at the University of Washington (with Profs. Nathan Sniadecki, Tracy Popowics, and Cole DeForest) and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center (with Prof. Stephen Tapscott). Lauren’s second project also focused on using the Theberge lab’s at-home blood collection and stabilization kit known as homeRNA, where Lauren specifically used homeRNA to look at the transcriptomic effects of wildfire smoke exposure in the Pacific Northwest on inflammatory immune response. Lauren has accepted a position with Seabright, where she will further apply and expand homeRNA to a multi-omics approach to study human health. Lauren’s favorite memories with the Chemistry Department include all of the graduate student barbecues throughout the year, hanging out in Rab’s Room during the first year of graduate school, and getting to see her friends in the hallway in between experiments.