Science in the City: The Hamilton Spectator's Steve Buist interviews Heather Sheardown

Heather Sheardown

Paul O'Byrne

Martin Daly

Heather Sheardown

Mehran Anvari

Ralph Pudritz

Brian Baetz & Cameron Churchill

Science in the CIty
Overview & Schedule

Heather Sheardown

The following article is reprinted courtesy of the Hamilton Spectator, McMaster University’s partner in the Science in the City Lecture Series.

News, Saturday, March 1, 2003
Engineering new body parts topic of prof's lecture

Steve Buist
The Hamilton Spectator

Think engineering and most people picture the construction of bridges or skyscrapers.

But building better body parts?

It's not a connection that leaps immediately to mind but that's the goal of Dr. Heather Sheardown, a professor of chemical engineering at McMaster University.

Sheardown will be delivering a lecture entitled The Role of the Engineer in Health Care Tuesday night in the Spectator auditorium as part of the Science in the City lecture series sponsored jointly by McMaster and The Spectator. Her talk coincides with National Engineering Week.

The focus of her work is in the emerging area of tissue engineering.

"We look at what happens in the normal biological environment and try to mimic that in some way," said Sheardown. "Tissues are usually extremely complex so what we try to do is pick one or two attributes of the tissue and focus on those."

She is working on two separate projects that could eventually lead to new products that doctors would be able to implant into the body.

One is a synthetic blood vessel that would have a much smaller diameter than those currently available.

The challenge has been to figure out how to avoid the formation of clots, which means tinkering with the materials that are applied as a coating to the inside of the vessel so that blood will flow through smoothly.

The implications are huge -- a wider area of synthetic blood vessels would allow for vascular grafts to be performed for a broader range of procedures, including bypass surgery and heart tissue repair.

The other product she's working on is an artificial version of the cornea, the transparent window into the eye.

"The cornea is actually a fairly simple tissue as far as tissues go," said Sheardown. There are no blood vessels, so there's not that complication.

"It's a nice model to start with in terms of developing a replacement system."

Sheardown graduated in chemical engineering at McMaster, received her PhD at the University of Toronto and then returned to McMaster.

"I've always been very interested in the body and the medical aspects of engineering, understanding the biological system and then using that. That's really what engineers do -- understand what's going on and then translating that into something that can be used.

"When you look at the body, really there's so much engineering in it," she added. "You could model all different parts of the body using engineering models. If only we could design a pump that works as well as the heart, for example."

Engineering has typically been a male-dominated field. In Sheardown's graduating class of 24 students, there were only three women.

The numbers of women are increasing, however, and Sheardown hopes she can be a role model to help attract more women into the field.

"I think girls have some really interesting perspectives on engineering," said Sheardown. "I think women in general tend to be very socially conscious and tend to look at those issues and I think that's really needed in a lot of different applications, not just medicine and environment."

Tuesday's lecture is free and open to the public.

To register for a spot, call 905-525-9140 ext. 24934 or e-mail at sciencecity@mcmaster.ca. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.; the session starts at 7 p.m.

sbuist@thespec.com or 905-526-3226.