In 2020, right when Jane Baude was starting her PhD research, she learned that a critical component of her experiment — the gel needed to grow and test mammary epithelial cells — wouldn’t be available for nearly a year because of pandemic-related production issues. So, she and her adviser, UCSB professor Ryan Stowers, decided to pivot. Instead, Baude would engineer her own gel to study cells.| engineering.ucsb.edu