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What if the most powerful tools for understanding the human brain are the very tiny particles we're learning to build, atom by atom? In this episode of No Reason to Get Excited (NRTGE), Dr. Aaron Winkler sits down with Rebecca Pinals, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University and Institute Scholar at Sarafan ChEM-H, to explore the frontier where nanotechnology, neuroscience, and chemical engineering collide.

From carbon nanotubes that glow in the near-infrared, to the "protein corona" that makes biological systems so beautifully unpredictable, to lipid nanoparticles that may one day flush the brain clean of disease, Rebecca walks through how her lab is engineering microscopic tools to crack one of medicine's hardest problems: Alzheimer's disease. Along the way, Aaron and Rebecca dig into why almost everything we know about the brain comes from animals that aren't quite us, how a handful of cells can self-assemble into a working capillary inside a hydrogel, and why the long-overlooked story of lipids may be the missing piece in our understanding of neurodegeneration.

About the Guest
Rebecca Pinals is an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University and an Institute Scholar at Sarafan ChEM-H. The Pinals Lab engineers neuro-models and nano-tools to uncover mechanisms of neurodegenerative disease, with a particular emphasis on the blood–brain barrier, the vascular interface that serves as the molecular gateway into the brain. Rebecca trained as a chemical engineer at Brown University, completed her PhD in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UC Berkeley with Professor Markita Landry as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, and pivoted into neuroscience as a Schmidt Science Fellow during her postdoc at MIT's Picower Institute, working with Professors Li-Huei Tsai and Bob Langer. Her lab combines induced pluripotent stem cell–based 3D brain models with the rational design of nanoparticles to study, intervene in, and ultimately treat diseases like Alzheimer's.

Connect with Rebecca
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccapinals/

Chapters

00:00 – Cold Open: A Chemical Engineer at the Edge of Neuroscience

00:32 – Meet Rebecca Pinals

01:20 – From Conventional Catalysis to a Love of the Nanoscale

03:42 – Carbon Nanotubes That Glow in the Near-Infrared

09:55 – The Protein Corona Problem

12:30 – Lipid Nanoparticles, mRNA Vaccines, and a COVID Pivot

14:18 – Why Alzheimer's: The Forgotten Lipid Story

18:34 – APOE, Astrocytes, and Lipoproteins as Therapeutics

24:15 – Why We Need a Human Blood-Brain Barrier Model

33:35 – Endothelial Cells, Pericytes, and the Real Anatomy of the BBB

42:48 – When Cells Find Each Other: Self-Assembly Into Capillaries

50:51 – Microplastics, Prions, and What We Don't Know We're Doing

54:17 – The Moments a Scientist Lives For

57:40 – Becoming a PI: From the Bench to Big Science

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Connect with Dr. Aaron Winkler

• Website: www.aaronwinklermd.com
• LinkedIn: @NRTGEPOD
• Instagram @NRTGEPOD