“There was such a unique intersection and balance between biology, chemistry, materials and mechanics, and I found that the department fostered an ambitious yet thoughtful and creative environment,” she said. “It was all really exciting to me — I felt like I had a lot of space to grow and explore how all of these disciplines connect to one another in different ways.”

As an undergraduate student, Mottel continued doing research in the Gleghorn lab on a biomimetic drug delivery platform; she was also an active member of the UD student chapter of the Biomedical Engineering Society and a contributor and editor of the 186 South College, the UD Honors College Blog. She earned her bachelor’s degree with honors in 2023.

Understanding immune system complexities

Mottel is currently a first-year doctoral student and graduate research assistant working in the Kwee Lab, a research group focused on combining bio-compatible materials with therapeutics and the body’s own immune cells to improve tissue regeneration after disease or injury.

For her dissertation project, Mottel is developing an injectable hydrogel that can promote muscle, nerve and blood vessel repair during ischemia, a condition experienced by patients with diabetes and other arterial diseases where certain areas of the body don’t receive enough blood. The long-term goal is for these hydrogels to manipulate the body’s own regulatory T-cells, the white blood cells that control how the immune system reacts to unknown substances, to help make the healing process work more effectively.  

“We're trying to see if we can modulate your local, adaptive immune system at sites of muscle injury and disease, with the goal of striking a balance between inflammation and having a more restorative environment,” Mottel said. “We’re looking at how this hydrogel can provide timed and spatial delivery of the cytokine that’s supposed to recruit regulatory T-cells and, through that pathway, try to naturally stimulate repair at sites of ischemia.”

“Lauren's project is highly interdisciplinary and requires a large breadth of knowledge that spans material science, chemistry, drug delivery, immunology and muscle physiology,” Kwee added. “Lauren is a very fast learner, which has helped her rapidly learn many techniques in my laboratory these past five months. She is extremely bright, hardworking, creative and sociable, and she exemplifies what I look for in a graduate student in terms of both research quality and creating a welcoming, supportive and collaborative environment in my lab.”

While the experiments required for her project are challenging, Mottel is up for the challenge and the opportunity to work on this “very translatable research,” she said. “The immune system is very complex, especially when you’re trying to decouple this specific pathway from other effects. But I think that makes the work even more exciting, because if you’re able to break things down, you can really start to understand the architecture of how everything pieces itself together into this amazing control system.”  

Communicating and creating

Outside of her research in the lab, her Ph.D. coursework, and her duties as a teaching assistant for the department, Mottel is also the graduate outreach chair of the UD chapter of the Biomedical Engineering Society. In this role, she helps lead and coordinate local STEM outreach activities, which this past academic year included hosting a group of Girl Scouts at UD during the fall of 2023 and conducting lab demonstrations for second grade students at Brandywine Elementary.

“I feel like I’ve always been more of a written communicator, especially with regards to science, but outreach is something I really wanted to challenge myself to do,” she said. “It’s a great way not only to connect with others, but also try to figure out different modes of learning and how you can rephrase scientific concepts so more people can understand them. It’s also a way to share my passions with others while mirroring that childlike wonder back onto myself.”

When Mottel needs to unwind, she enjoys fostering her creativity through writing, photography and crochet, the latter of which she taught herself how to do last summer.

“Crochet has been a really great way for me not only to be creative, but also not to look at a screen,” she said. “It’s also nice not to be able to unplug without having to think too hard but while still getting to create something out of thin air.”

When asked about her writing style, Mottel said that “I find that specific details will stand out to me as I’m going through my day, like cinematic snapshots of how I perceive the world. Then, when I write, I try to break down everything I perceive — the way light shines through trees, the sound of footsteps on cobblestones — to make more enriching imagery.”

Mottel also spends time tracing her family’s roots. Working with her uncle, she helps recover family photos and interviews extended family members to help to fill in missing gaps in the timeline of her Chinese-Jamaican ancestry.

A jack-of-all-trades field of study

Mottel said that she feels “honored” to be the latest recipient of the Laird Fellowship. 

“When I first learned about George Laird, I really resonated with his spirit, how he used his passions to thrive in both his career and his personal life, and how I actively try to combine my creative hobbies with science and research,” she said.

Whether it’s unraveling the complexities of the immune system or unwinding yarn for a new crochet project, what drives Mottel is the ability to “weave a story of connections, for it is through pursuit and conservation of our connections with knowledge, with others, and with our very sense of self that we may effectively grow as individuals,” she said her application dossier.

Mottel also reflected on the commonly held, self-deprecating sentiment that biomedical engineers are seen as the “jack of all trades, master of none” when compared to other engineering fields. But this Renaissance woman doesn’t see that sentiment as a bad thing.

“Being a jack of all trades means you get to have a really wide breadth and depth of engagement with all these different fields,” she said. “Now, thanks to the Laird Fellowship, I have the support to continue to dive into my passions to an even greater extent.”

About the Laird Fellowship

The Laird Fellowship honors the memory of UD alumnus George W. Laird, who earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree from UD. After passing away in a tragic accident at the age of 35, George’s family and friends established the fellowship fund.

The Laird Fellowship is designed to encourage the recipient to become engaged in broad intellectual pursuits that can be outside of the recipient’s chosen field of study. The Fellowship, which comes with $28,500 in tuition funding, has been granted annually since 1978.