Dr Amy Gelmi

Amy Gelmi is a Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow at RMIT University where she has established a multi-disciplinary research group focused on external stimulus for targeted tissue engineering.

A major focus of the group is using advanced bio AFM to track and characterise intracellular changes in live stem cells with the application of external stimuli, in order to elucidate the mechanisms triggered by the stimuli. Using custom fabricated cell culture and stimulation devices, the temporal response of live stem cells to stimulation is probed to understand how It affects stem cell fate.

This work aims to develop new approaches to personalised medicine, generating targeted tissue on an individual patient basis and is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant (DP200100612).

Amy’s previous work has also included the study of how RGD concentration in hydrogels affects the presentation of individual cell surface receptors. In particular, the research used single cell atomic force spectroscopy to quantify RGD unbinding forces on a synthetic hydrogel. This revealed that short-term binding of human mesenchymal stem cells was sensitive to RGD concentration.

Dr Amy Gelmi

Recent AFM-related papers:

• Lin, Y., Penna, M., Spicer, C. D., Higgins, S. G., Gelmi, A., Kim, N., Wang, S-T., Wojciechowski, J. P., Pashuck, E. T., Yarovsky, I. and Stevens, M. M. (2021). ‘High-Throughput Peptide Derivatization toward Supramolecular Diversification in Microtiter Plates’. ACS Nano, 15(3), 4034-4044.

• Maynard, S. A., Gelmi, A., Skaalure, S. C., Pence, I. J., Lee-Reeves, C., Sero, J. E., Whittaker, T. E. and Stevens, M. M. (2020). ‘Nanoscale Molecular Quantification of Stem Cell-Hydrogel Interactions’. ACS Nano, 14(12), 17321-17332.

• Reineck, P., Abraham, A. N., Poddar, A., Shukla, R., Abe, H., Ohshima, T., Gibson, B. C., Dekiwadia, C., Conesa, J. J., Pereiro, E., Gelmi, A. and Bryant, G. (2020). ‘Multimodal Imaging and Soft X-Ray Tomography of Fluorescent Nanodiamonds in Cancer Cells’. Biotechnology Journal, 16(3), 2000289.

Biography: Amy completed her BSc Nanotechnology degree from Curtin University (Australia) in 2007 before joining Prof. Gordon Wallace’s Intelligent Polymer Research Institute (IPRI) at the University of Wollongong (Australia) to undertake her PhD using AFM to study organic conductive polymers. She then joined the Biosensors and Bioelectronics Centre at Linköping University (Sweden) (2012) to research electroactive scaffold design with mesenchymal stem cells for cardiac patch applications.

Subsequently, Amy worked as a Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellow in the Stevens Group at Imperial College London (UK) from 2015. Her research focused on understanding stem cell behaviour on dynamic biomaterials using highly sensitive real-time characterisation tools for tissue engineering goals.

Now at RMIT University (Australia), Dr Gelmi holds a Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellowship and is based in the School of Science. Alongside her current research she supervises several undergraduate and postgraduate research students and lectures in Chemistry for Life Sciences.

Twitter: @DrTinyTaps

Website(s): Dr Amy Gelmi - RMIT University, http://www.thegelmigroup.org/

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