NWO Veni award for Vesna Bacheva

Vesna Bacheva, Assistant Professor at the Groningen Research Institute of Pharmacy (GRIP), has been awarded the prestigious NWO Veni grant (Applied and Engineering Sciences) for her research project "Lab-on-a-Chip Platform for Single-Cell Mechanobiology."

Cells live in a world of forces. They are constantly pulled, stretched, and compressed, and these mechanical cues, alongside chemical ones, determine how cells grow and function. Yet such forces are difficult to recreate in the lab. The grant will support her development of a high-throughput on-chip platform delivering real-time, user-defined mechanical stimulation to individual cells. This platform lays the groundwork for a new generation of organ-on-chip systems with high biological relevance for studying tissue function.