RAPID CITY, S.D. — Whitney Ponwith didn’t plan on studying tissue engineering.

She started her college career on a nursing track before she found a love for engineering and changed her focus.

In her sophomore year, she transitioned into biomedical engineering.

That led to tissue engineering.

“I really like the idea of helping other people, especially with, like, regenerative medicine and healing. I’ve had some family members with some like, bad scarring, and so it kind of is an inspiration to me for doing this research a little bit,” said Ponwith, an Accelerated Master’s student at the Mines.

Ponwith is a graduate student in the Mines accelerated Biomedical Engineering program.

Her work earned her a coveted National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship that provides three years of financial support over a five-year period.

The grant will allow her to continue her research into wound healing through electrospun nanofiber scaffolds – a process that uses an electric charge to spin fine fibers from a polymer solution.

“So right now, what I’m working on is making these tiny biodegradable fibers, and then we coat them and what we call hyaluronic acid binding peptide, and this just promotes faster wounds healing with less scarring,” Ponwith said.

Or to put that another way…

“When we’re still babies or in the womb, we heal scarlessly, and that’s because of the hyaluronan that’s in our environment. And so we’re basically trying to recreate that neonatal environment in adults with these scaffolds,” Ponwith said.

Her work could impact scarless healing, reduce internal scarring, and possibly contribute to anti-aging therapies.

It’s complicated work Ponwith and her colleagues do at Mines that she said will either keep her in academia or move her into the private industry and take her lab work to the world stage.

“It’s a huge honor,” Ponwith said. “I was super shocked and thrilled when I found out that I received the grant, and it just means a lot to me, because not only can I continue my education, but it also just shows that the research that I’m doing right now can actually make a difference.”

Jerry Steinley has lived in the Black Hills most of his life and calls Rapid City home. He received a degree in Journalism with a minor in Political Science from Metropolitan State University in Denver in 1994.