Professor and Chair, School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, NTU
Programme Director, Singapore Centre for 3D Printing (SC3DP)
Programme Director (3DP), HP-NTU Digital Manufacturing Corp Lab
Team member
Dr. Ratima Suntornnond
Research Fellow
Nanyang Technological University
Ratima’s interest is in additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, particularly in bioprinting or the research about biomaterials. She is an experienced Research Engineer with a demonstrated history of working in both the industry and the higher education industry.
She received her B.Eng. (1st class honours, Chemical Engineering) in 2012 from Thammasat University, Thailand. She completed her PhD research in Mechanical Engineering, in 2018 from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interests include Biodegradable polymer fabrication, Hydrogel and Bioprinting for tissue engineering.
Bioprinting
Bioprinting is a breakthrough technology that integrates living cells, biomaterials, and a robotic dispensing system to create complex structures that mimic original tissues and organs. One of the main components of bioprinting is bioink and hydrogel is essential in bioink formulation. In bioprinting, hydrogel should have good biocompatibility, provide good resolution, and have sufficient mechanical strength to support printed structures. To date bioprinting has been used for many applications from drug testing, cancer study, stem cell study to tissue engineering (TE). It has a few advantages. First, bioprinting technology provides high precision control from the robotic system, which can be used for cells coculture, cell patterning, and fabrication of 3D complex tissue model. Second, by involving robotic machines and computer aided design (CAD) with biological substrates, it is possible to create complex tissue structure with living cells. Moreover, the use of automated machine can overcome the problems of repeatability and upscaling fabrication as found in conventional TE technologies. Lastly, the bioprinting technique is relatively simple and provides rapid tissue model prototypes for researchers to study.