Little children often dream of becoming astronauts or deep-sea explorers, but at age 5, Herdeline Ardoña wanted to be a chemical engineer. As career aspirations go, it’s a precocious choice. But Ardoña says that she was inspired by her grandmother, Adela Mallari, a chemical engineer who worked for the government of the Philippines, where Ardoña grew up. Her grandmother was well respected in the community, so “I had a very positive view of what a female engineer looks like,” Ardoña says.

Now Ardoña is the one setting an example. As a biomaterials engineer at the University of California, Irvine, Ardoña—who goes by the nickname Digs—creates materials that might one day solve the organ donor shortage or help scientists grow tissues that could be used to screen drugs or study diseases. Her goal is to recreate the body’s support structures for growing cells by mimicking their surface chemistry, their mechanics, and the way they organize cells. But she also goes beyond mimicry by giving these systems nonnatural properties so that they can stimulate or probe biological behavior.

For example, Ardoña’s group uses macromolecules that respond to various stimuli, including light, electricity, and chemical changes, to control or examine cellular behavior. “The way that we do this is really through careful molecular engineering of those macromolecules,” she says.

One major focus of her laboratory work is heart disease. Ardoña is working to identify materials that will grow and stimulate cardiomyocytes, the specialized muscle cells that control how the heart contracts to pump blood through the body. Her lab designed molecules that assemble into a matrix on a specialized surface, forming a material on which cardiomyocytes can grow. Scientists could use this lab-grown cardiac tissue to study how heart disease progresses in the cells or how drugs might be able to protect them. Her lab also develops polymeric materials that connect to cardiomyocytes. In one example, her group has made a material that prompts the cardiomyocytes to contract and release in response to pulses of light, simulating how pacemakers work but without any wires.

Another project she’s collaborating on aims to create matrices that can house brain organoids, tiny structures that contain the brain’s various cells. These systems could be used to study neurological development and neurodegeneration.

Ardoña says her mother, who is a nurse, inspired her to tackle biomedical problems with her research. As an undergraduate, Ardoña considered becoming a doctor but realized that she enjoyed research and could use her skills as a scientist to help people in other ways. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a breakthrough in the lab? Then you can help more patients that way,” she says.

In the Philippines, Ardoña says, she didn’t have access to some of the advanced scientific equipment most chemists would consider necessary for research. For example, when she was an undergraduate at the University of the Philippines Diliman, the school didn’t have a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer. If she needed NMR analysis, she had to send her samples to Taiwan.

Although she considered staying in the Philippines to teach, she decided to study for her PhD in the US. In 2012, she started her doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University, where she worked with J. D. Tovar and Hai-Quan Mao at the school’s Institute for Nanobiotechnology. In 2017, she joined Kit Parker’s group at Harvard University, where she was the American Chemical Society Irving S. Sigal postdoctoral fellow.

Tovar remembers Ardoña as fearless in the lab. “She was driven, determined, and she knew what she wanted,” he says. “But at the same time, she was a genuinely nice person.” As an independent researcher, Ardoña has been making innovative materials for biomedical applications, Tovar says. “It’s rare to see early-stage researchers such as herself have that breadth.”

Ardoña says being able to use her engineering, biochemistry, and polymer know-how is what makes research exciting for her. Chemistry, she says, really is the central science: it combines the problem-solving of math and physics with the tangible concepts of biology. “I just really enjoy being able to think across disciplines,” she says.