On 16 September 2026, Abdel Rahman Abdel Fattah, Principal Investigator at CeMM, the Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, gave an Impromptu Seminar at AITHYRA. Abdel is heading the Multiscale Mechanobiology and Bioengineering group at CeMM. He completed his PhD in Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering at McMaster University in Canada, followed by postdoctoral research in Leuven, Belgium, and later at CeMM.
Seminar Talk “Building Tissues: From Self-Organization to Programmable Organization”
Modern organoids and 3D tissue cultures rely on self-organization to generate the cellular phenotypes that define their biology. This process emerges from cell-ECM interactions, mechanical signaling, metabolic state transitions, and cell fate specification. While these aspects have been studied extensively, they are often investigated separately, leaving their interplay during tissue formation poorly understood. At the same time, biological variability remains a major challenge, suggesting that self-organization can follow multiple trajectories and outcomes, hampering reproducibility in studies.
Through quantitative imaging, single-cell transcriptomics, and computational modeling, the research of Abdel demonstrates how dynamic cell-ECM feedback drives morphogenesis while coupling mechanical, metabolic, and fate patterning. These results reveal how local interactions give rise to tissue-scale organization. And in a second part he introduced a magnetic bioprinting platform for programmable cellular organization, developed to reduce the variability inherent to self-organizing systems while maintaining the high-throughput requirements of modern screening platforms.
Thank you Abel, for sharing your knowledge on how to build new bioengineering tools, profiling transcriptomic landscapes, and bridging the multicellular and molecular dimensions of mechanoregulation.
#ImpromptuSeminar #AITHYRA #CeMM
