Dr. Dougan obtained a B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Arkansas and Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she studied soft tissue/material biomechanics pertaining to traumatic brain injury and worked with custom biomaterials to study extracellular remodeling in injury and disease. She trained as a postdoctoral fellow in the chemistry and engineering departments at Smith College, where she worked on conjugating proteins and peptides to polymers for targeted glioblastoma drug delivery. Dr. Dougan joined the Center for Biomedical Engineering Technology Acceleration (BETA Center) as a biomaterials specialist.
The BETA Center offers equipment and expertise in developing and characterizing novel biomaterials. Our aim is to assist NIH clinical researchers in implementing innovative biomaterials into their research, whether that’s designing custom synthetic biomaterials, functionalizing existing materials to provide specific cellular cues, or characterizing mechanical and biochemical properties of biomaterials for reproducibility. Dr. Dougan has assisted NIH researchers in engineering materials for biomedical research including fabricating microneedle patches for interstitial fluid collection and using microfluidics to generate reproducible fibrin microbeads for cartilage regeneration. Dr. Dougan has also assisted NIH researchers in better understanding the properties of their biomaterials through mechanical characterization of soft agarose brain tissue constructs, pluronic used in 3D bioprinting of arterial vessels, and decellularized extracellular matrix biomaterials used as implantable materials in soft tissue defects.