Dr Aliz Kunstar​

Dr Aliz Kunstar​

Craniofacial Tissue Regeneration Laboratory, National Dental Research Institute Singapore

Aliz Kunstar earned her Master of Science degree in Biological Sciences at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. She pursued her master thesis research at National Medical Centre Hungary, in the Department of Stem Cell Biology studying the chondrogenic potential of mesenchymal stem cells from patients with rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis in a microculture system. She obtained her PhD degree in Tissue Engineering at University Twente, the Netherlands, in the Department of Tissue Regeneration under the supervision of Professor Clemens van Blitterswijk, Professor Marcel Karperien and Assistant Professor Aart van Apeldoorn. Her PhD research was focused on confocal Raman micro-spectroscopy in cartilage tissue engineering applications. She then worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of Michigan, USA, in the Department of Internal Medicine under a biological drug discovery research program to identify medical treatment strategies for post-traumatic osteoarthritis with Professor Blake Roessler and Dr Thomas Lanigan.

Currently, she works as a Research Fellow at NDRIS, in the Craniofacial Tissue Regeneration Laboratory of Assistant Professor Hemant Vijaykumar Unadkat. Her research focuses on cell-biomaterial interactions and particularly on identifying optimal surface topographies which promote craniofacial tissue regeneration. By employing the materiomics high-throughput screening approach and machine-learning algorithms, she and her team has successfully identified optimal surface topographies to stimulate endodontic regeneration, soft tissue integration of dental implants, and bone and soft tissue regeneration to develop a bi-layered topographical-driven bioactive barrier membrane for patients with tooth loss and dental alveolar bone defects. She received the Best Poster Presentation Award at the NDCS ORH ACP-A*STAR-NTU Tripartite Symposium in 2018.

Current Projects

From serendipity to predictability: A novel topographical-driven bioactive membrane for guided tissue regeneration

A biomaterials approach for endodontic (dental pulp) regeneration

Bioactive surface topographies for promoting soft tissue integration of dental implants
 


Publications and/or research projects

1. Kunstar A, et al. Label-free Raman monitoring of extracellular matrix formation in three-dimensional polymeric scaffolds. J R Soc Interface 2013;10(86):20130464.
   
   
2. Kunstar A, et al. Recognizing different tissues in human fetal femur cartilage by label-free Raman micro-spectroscopy. J Biomed Opt 2012;17(11):116012.
   
3. Kunstar A, et al. Raman Micro-spectroscopy – A non-invasive analysis tool for monitoring of collagen-containing extracellular matrix formation in a medium-throughput culture system. Tissue Eng Part C: ME 2011;17(7):737-44.