Student Profiles

Kerry Wilson
Chemistry Ph.D. Candidate

Kerry is originally from California, but grew up in Aiken, South Carolina. Kerry completed a Bachelor's degree in Biology at Clemson and a Master's in Science in BioEngineering at Clemson University. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Chemistry at the University of Central Florida under the mentorship of Dr. James J. Hickman. "I have one main project. It is the reflex arc on-a-chip project where we are growing muscle cells on cantilevers and also on motor neurons, to try and get the motor neurons to innervate the muscle so you can stimulate the muscle and then flex their cantilever and measure it with an atomic force microscope (AFM). So you have a little laser that bounces off the bottom of it and you can measure the stress generated by the muscle fiber on the cantilever. The whole reflex arc project is aimed at building an in vitro analogue of the spinal reflex arc for studying ALS, spinal cord injury, and this is also applicable to bioprosthesis and robotics". Kerry will be finishing his Ph.D. soon and then plans on continuing this line of research in a post-doctoral fellowship.