Pamela received her MS degree in Chemical Engineering from Rowan University where, after earning her BS degree, she was first introduced to tissue engineering. Under the guidance of Dr. Andrea Jennifer Vernengo, Pamela engineered and characterized stimuli-responsive biomaterials for applications in intervertebral disc degeneration and spinal cord injury. Pamela went on to join Dr. Kara Spiller’s lab for Biomaterials and Regenerative Medicine at Drexel University in 2014, where she developed an in vitro model of biomaterial vascularization to investigate how macrophages, immune cells that regulate the inflammatory response, can be harnessed to direct blood vessel growth. In support of this work, Pamela received a U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation Travel Grant award and a Louis and Bessie Stein Fellowship to conduct research in Prof. Shulamit Levenberg’s Lab at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.
After earning her PhD in Biomedical Engineering, Pamela joined Dr. Ankur Singh’s lab at Cornell University, where she completed postdoctoral research using ex vivo organoid models to characterize how tissue microenvironments instruct immune cells in health and disease. She joined Prof. Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic’s lab in 2020, where she is currently using a multi-tissue platform to model and delineate the contributions of tissue resident immune cells to pre-metastatic niche formation and tumor metastasis.