Beth Pruitt

Biography

Dr. Pruitt moved to UC Santa Barbara in 2018 to help launch a biological engineering degree program and our new Bioengineering Department. She has served as the founding chair since 2021. She is an elected Fellow of BMES, AIMBE, and ASME and Senior Member of IEEE. She has been recognized by the NSF CAREER Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, Denice Denton Leadership Award. Dr. Beth Pruitt graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with an S.B. in mechanical engineering. She was supported by a Navy ROTC fellowship at MIT where she learned sailing, leadership, and perseverance. She earned an M.S. in Manufacturing Systems Engineering from Stanford University before serving as an officer in the U.S. Navy. Her first tour was at the engineering headquarters of the Navy nuclear program providing engineering review and oversight to refueling operations. Her second tour was as at the U.S. Naval Academy as an instructor teaching Systems Engineering during the academic year and offshore sailing in the summer. She earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University where she specialized in MEMS and small-scale metrologies for electrical contacts and was supported by a Hertz Foundation Fellowship. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) where she worked on polymer MEMS. Dr. Pruitt founded and led the Microsystems Lab at Stanford for 15 years, with research focused on small-scale metrologies for interdisciplinary micromechanics problems in mechanobiology, biomechanics and sensing. She was a visiting professor in Prof. Viola Vogel's Lab for Applied Mechanobiology in the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at ETH, Zurich in 2012.

Research [video overview]

I am interested in the biophysics and mechanisms of mechanobiology, i.e., the role of mechanical force in the evolution of structure and function in human pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocytes (hPSC-CMs) including related topics of cell adhesion, downstream signaling and mechanoresponse. Our lab has developed technologies to enhance maturity in hiPSC-CMs and make quantitative measurements of cell responses to drugs or in the presence of disease mutations. Our research interests span from custom microtechnologies for small-scale mechanical measurements to questions of how mechanics mediate biological signaling. Normal force sensing, remodeling and load bearing by cells are essential for basic life processes. For example, we study signaling, and mechanisms and forces of cell adhesion in coordinating cell behavior and response to mechanical changes, as well as the development and response of stem cells and cardiac myocytes to mechanical loading. We design and fabricate most of our own tools and sensors and are interested in reliable and quantitative measurements of fundamental biophysics to answer novel questions in the areas of physiology, cardiology, stem cells, cell biology,  and neuroscience. (BioEngineering)