Angelika Zaszczyńska (MSc) from the Laboratory of Polymers and Biomaterials, IPPT PAN has won a scholarship of the Czesław M. Rodkiewicz Scholarship Foundation. The Foundation provides a one-time funding to doctoral candidates and students in order to facilitate their research and defend their doctoral dissertations. The scholarships are awarded to the Polish engineers who carry out research in technical and medical science. Professor Czesław M. Rodkiewicz (1918-2010) established the fund in 1999. Each year, two Polish scientists are awarded the Scholarship. So far, the Foundation has allocated 90,000 CAD to the Polish science.
For more information about the Foundation and its scholarship holders, visit: https://www.cmrsf.ca/Laureaci.htm
Angelika Zaszczyńska graduated with honors from the Lublin University of Technology in materials engineering in 2017. Since 2018, she has been carrying out her doctoral research at the Laboratory of Polymers and Biomaterials, IPPT PAN, under the supervision of professor Paweł Sajkiewicz, the Laboratory Head. She is currently preparing her thesis titled: “Opracowanie nowej strategii wytwarzania i modyfikacji piezoelektrycznych polimerowych nanowłókien jako inteligentnych rusztowań w inżynierii tkanki nerwowej” about designing a new strategy of producing and modifying piezoelectric polymer nanofibers as smart scaffoldings in nervous tissue engineering.
Angelika Zaszczyńska’s research encompasses innovative techniques of forming smart piezoelectric scaffolds. She comments:
“We are witnesses to a disconcerting phenomenon of our societies aging. More and more people are being hospitalized due to illnesses related to the nervous system, and nerve and spinal cord damages. Despite considerable achievements in medicine, there are still diseases that cannot be effectively cured, leaving many patients suffering. Just like tissue in our organisms, Smart cell scaffolds are stimuli-responsive, which means that they generate electric signals in response to applied tension, they stimulate signal pathways, which, in turn, supports the regeneration of damaged tissue. In longer perspective, my research is aimed to support modern medicine and to become an effective solution to discover and implement new methods of diagnostics and treatment”.
Angelika Zaszczyńska has already had successes on her scorecard. In 2018, she was the runner-up in the best thesis award conferred by Stowarzyszenie Inżynierów i Techników Mechaników, and in 2021, she won the best presentation award conferred by the European Advanced Materials Congress in Sweden. She cooperates with the University of Cambridge and the University of Illinois, Chicago, with professor Alexandr Yarin’s group, where she also served an internship as part of a project on international cooperation in complex systems and modern technologies, organized by the National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA-ITHACA).
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The awardee is yet another scholarship holder of the Czesław M. Rodkiewicz Scholarship Foundation who works at the IPPT PAN. The 2021 edition of the competition brought a scholarship to doctoral candidate Oliwia Jeznach (MSc), also from the Laboratory of Polymers and Biomaterials, who is also supervised by prof. Paweł Sajkiewicz.
