Pedron Haba has worked on establishing in vitro platforms for evaluating microenvironmental pressures impacting brain tumor growth and evolution. These efforts concentrate on the development of 3D hydrogel platforms as well as microfluidic forming technologies to create ex vivo platforms that better replicate the tumor microenvironment for rapid clinical assessment of the multiple potential therapeutic strategies on a patient-specific basis. More recently, Pedron Haba has established the use of an enzymatically-cross-linkable gelatin hydrogel system to explore the effects of hypoxia-induced oxidative stress on neuroglia, astrocyte reactivity, and myelin production. This versatile platform offers new possibilities for drug discovery and modeling brain disease progression. Pedron Haba’s current research focuses on the identification of pathophysiological signatures of the malignant glioblastoma niche in response to alteration of the tumor microenvironment.
Sara Pedron Haba received her B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Valencia (Spain) and Ph.D. at the Institute of Polymer Science and Technology in Madrid in 2008, focusing on the fabrication of complex biomaterial platforms for heart valve regeneration. In 2009, Pedron Haba joined Philips Research in the Netherlands as a Research Scientist to work on smart materials for cell delivery. Currently, Pedron Haba is a research assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.