My research program focuses on engineering complex microenvironmental models of disease. Areas of interest include the tumor microenvironment (TME) and immune interactions in allergy and infectious disease. We create microphyiological systems (MPS) of the TME that aim to recapitulate the architecture and multicellular interactions within the tumor. The low number of cells required allow us to build patient-specific models, where all of the cells are isolated from a single patient, which have strong potential for use in precision medicine applications. Ongoing projects are using these MPS to answer biological and clinical questions in prostate cancer, head and neck cancer, renal cell carcinoma, and bone metastases. We also use MPS to investigate immune responses to inflammation, allergy and infection. These permit investigation of human immune responses whicn can often differ from in vivo models. Active projects within the lab are investigating human immune responses to parasitic infection in MPS.