Our Team
Principal Investigator
Aitor Aguirre, Ph.D.
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Dr. Aguirre obtained his B.S. in Biology and M.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of the Basque Country and his Ph.D. in Material Science and Tissue Engineering at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC). For his postdoctoral training Dr. Aguirre joined The Salk Institute under the supervision of J.C. Izpisua-Belmonte, where he explored in vivo reprogramming applied to cardiac regeneration (Cell Stem Cell, 2014), and made significant contributions to non-coding RNA biology in human development (Cell Stem Cell, 2014; Circulation, 2015). Dr. Aguirre became Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego in 2017 and joined IQ and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Michigan State University one year later. Dr. Aguirre has extensive experience in cardiac development, cardiovascular disease, tissue engineering and CRISPR/Cas9 genetic engineering. Dr. Aguirre has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Gangoiti Barrera Fellowship, the CIBER-BBN award, the Generalitat of Catalunya predoctoral fellowship, the Hispanic Center of Excellence award at the University of California and more recently an NHLBI K01 award.
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https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1383-2792Lab personnel
Lauren Squire, Lab Manager
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Lauren is a research assistant and laboratory manager for the Aguirre lab.
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Postdoctoral researchers
Aleksandra Kostina, Ph.D.
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Aleksandra obtained her B.S and M.S. in Embryology and Cell Biology at Saint Petersburg State University and her Ph.D. in Cardiovascular Sciences at the University of Verona. Through her Ph.D. project, she used primary human cells to unravel Notch-dependent molecular mechanisms causing ascending aortic aneurysm and aortic valve calcification. In 2020 she was a part of the team under the supervision of Deepak Srivastava, revealing a therapeutical candidate for heart valve disease (Science, 2020). After completing her Ph.D., she headed several projects funded by Russian Science Foundation and worked in the Institute of Cytology, RAS modeling in vitro cell-cell communications during early osteogenic processes. Aleksandra was a visiting researcher at Karolinska Institute and Humanitas Research Hospital, where she acquired extensive experience working with stem cells and cardiomyocytes. In March 2022, she joined the Aguirre Lab as a postdoctoral researcher. Her project aims to increase the complexity of human heart organoids and model early cardiac developmental events affected by medications taken during pregnancy resulting in embryo heart defects.
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Graduate students
Colin O'Hern
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Colin is a 3rd year DO/PhD candidate at Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine as part of the Biomedical Engineering Graduate Program. He obtained his B.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Maryland - Baltimore County in 2018. From 2018-2020, he worked as a laboratory technician in a structural biology lab under the supervision of Dr. Michael F. Summers, Ph.D., eliciting the 3D structure of proteins, RNAs, and protein-RNA complexes involved in HIV replication. Colin’s research interests include translational approaches to tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Currently, he is focused on modeling immune cell populations in both the developing and injured human heart by utilizing immune cells and cardiac organoids derived from pluripotent stem cells. This research aims to provide realistic human heart tissue models that can be used for high throughput testing and analysis for therapeutic development and to uncover novel phenomena about immune cells and their interactions with human heart tissue in developmental and disease states.
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Freyda Mannering
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Freyda is a second year DO/PhD student within the College of Osteopathic Medicine and the Department of Biomedical Engineering. She completed the first two years of her undergraduate degree at the University of Calgary under a collegiate soccer scholarship. In the next two years, she obtained her B.S. in Biology at Indiana University with highest distinction in 2021. She then completed her Masters in Medical Sciences with a concentration in Molecular Medicine from the University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine in 2022. Freyda’s current project examines the sexually dimorphic effects of elevated testosterone, estrogen, and/or progesterone treatment on engineered heart organoids. This research will help elucidate direct sex hormone effects on male and female heart development, morphology, and functionality. She hopes her research will be informative for clinical applications in cases of endocrine disorder pregnancies, and that it may reveal pathologic mechanisms contributing to the development of cardiovascular diseases later in life.
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Shakhlo Aminova
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Shakhlo is a second year Ph.D. student within the department of Biomedical Engineering. She completed her bachelors at MSU with a degree in Genomics and Molecular Genetics with a minor in Mathematics in 2021. From 2018-2022, she worked as a research assistant under the supervision of Dr. Masako Harada, where she focused on developing targeting delivery of Extracellular Vesicles (EVs) towards EGFR overexpressing tumor cells and pancreatic beta cells. EVs are lipid biolayer particles released from almost every cell type, and they have roles in intercellular communication through transporting genetic material like DNA, RNA, miRNA, etc. from a donor to recipient cell. Her current research involves investigating the role EVs have on the development of the heart organoids. The heart organoids provide the ideal model to studying heart derived EVs, as there is no chance of contamination from nearby organs or cells. This research aims to fill the gap in knowledge currently in the field of cardiac derived EVs.
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Visiting researchers
Undergraduate students
Ashlin Riggs (2021-2023)
Sammantha Caywood (2022-pres)
Erin Thomas (2022-2023)
Hussein Basrai (2022-2024)
Haley Lankerd (2022-2023)
Lauren Squire (2022-2023)
Past members
Jesús Ordoño, visiting scientist (2018-2019)
Kristen Ball, lab manager (2018-2020)
Manigandan Venkatesan, PhD, postdoctoral researcher (2022)
Yonatan Lewis-Israeli, graduate student (2018-2022)
Mishref Abdelhamid, clinical fellow (2020-2022)
Aaron Wasserman, graduate student (2018-2022)
Mirel Popa Adrian, PhD, visiting scholar (2022-2023)
Lorenzo Fontanelli, PhD, visiting scholar (2022-2022)
Priya Muniyandi, PhD, postdoctoral researcher (2022-2023)
Eder Medina, PhD, visiting scholar (2023-2024)
Brett Volmert, graduate student (2019-2024)
Lab pictures
Normal day in the lab
