Brockman receives NIH MIRA grant

Joshua Brockman, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has received a Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to support his work in mechanobiology.

The five-year, $1.86 million grant will allow Brockman to investigate how viscoelasticity—when a material behaves like both a solid and a liquid, ala biological tissues—affects cellular forces. Specifically, Brockman will explore forces at the level of cellular receptors, which could yield findings relevant to cancer and cell-based therapies such as cancer immunotherapy.