Congratulations to Dr. Suzanne Lightsey on the successful defense of her thesis and graduation!

During the Fall 2025 semester, Dr. Suzanne Lightsey successfully defended her thesis, Engineered Biomaterials for Investigating Natural Killer Cell Infiltration. Her work aimed to further our understanding of how Natural Killer (NK) cells interact with the extracellular matrices (ECM) of tumors in a controlled, modifiable hydrogel system as well as further the development of an accessible in vitro pre-clinical tumor model. The tumor ECM acts as a physical barrier for immune cell infiltration, limiting contact with target cancer cells required for NK cell efficacy. Through her hard work and dedication, she was able to successfully benchmark a PEG-based 3D lung tumor model against a traditional pre-clinical system, demonstrating via RNA-sequencing data that by 7 days, A549 cells in the PEG-based 3D lung tumor model develop transcriptomic and pathway features similar to 21-day xenografts in tumors. Dr. Lightsey also demonstrated that NK cells exhibit a mechanosensitive response to matrix stiffening and that NK cells use receptor for HA-mediated motility (RHAMM) to infiltrate hydrogels containing hyaluronic acid (HA). To further the ability to track NK cells in vivo, Dr. Lightsey also found that both NK92MI and primary NK cells could be labeled with iron oxide nanoparticles (IONPs) detectible by magnetic particle imaging (MPI). She developed a density gradient separation protocol that yielded higher iron content per cell than previously reported.

In her time with the Sharma Lab, Dr. Lightsey has mentored multiple undergraduate and graduate students and received the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. She was a recipient of the University of Florida’s Biomedical Engineering Graduate Student Excellence Award, and received an honorable mention from the Madeline Lockhart Dissertation Fellowship. A key contributor to the Gainesville community, Dr. Lightsey taught cell culture to over 70 students through the Graduate Student Cell Culture Workshop and led 10 K-12 outreach events through Tau Beta Pi. Dr. Lightsey has since graduated and will be pursuing her post-doctoral studies at Stanford University.

Congratulations, Dr. Lightsey! We are so proud of all you have accomplished and are excited to see what you do next.