The overall goal of our research endeavor is the development of new biomaterial-based strategies for gene/drug delivery and stem cell engineering. Towards this, my laboratory focuses on three major directions: (a) design and development of novel delivery systems for nucleic-acid based immunotherapy and cancer chemotherapy (b) engineering complex microenvironments to study and manipulate stem cells and understand their behavior in biomimetic, three-dimensional conditions and (c) developing novel engineering tools and high throughput methods to generate functional T cells and Dendritic cells from stem cells.