Meet the physician-scientist who is bioprinting vessels

In a small room inside her lab at the Emory University School of Medicine, Dr. Kaveeta Kaw adjusts the focus on a microscope, bringing a petri dish full of cells into sharp relief. For Kaw, the view inside her microscope is only one part of a complex puzzle: her current work explores how to study cells outside of a petri dish, in conditions more similar to the human body. For that, there’s a room at the far end of her lab — the bioprinting room — where she works with a team to create 3D printed vessels that the cells can be printed into.

Bioprinting allows Kaw to study the effect of therapeutics on cells in a form where a disease’s conditions can be better simulated — for example, the increased pressure associated with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). In fact, Kaw has developed a specific bioprinted model that models the lung vessel affected by PAH so she can design experiments that study the impact of specific therapeutics and recapitulates aspects of the disease. PAH is not well understood — the most common cause is “idiopathic” (medical jargon that Kaw confirmed means “unknown”) — nor are the most effective treatments. To be able to model the disease in this way is a huge step forward for understanding, and hopefully, treatment.

As a MD-PhD — meaning, she is trained and works as both a a physician in cardiology fellowship and postdoctoral researcher — Kaw’s days are spent moving between the two worlds of medicine and science. “It’s not like one day I wear a clinician’s hat, and the other days I wear a researcher’s hat,” Kaw said. “I’m always wearing both hats at the same time.” For some, the competing demands of both careers — both intensive commitments in their own right — might make the work unsustainable. For Kaw, the opposing spheres are complementary; her research is spurred on and focused by her clinical experience. As a researcher, “you never stop thinking about your next steps and you never stop thinking about how your data is contributing to the current scientific community… What I love about science is you’re just on a ride and it’s always going forward,” she said.

The work that Kaw and her five undergraduate mentees are pursuing is at the edge of innovation, she said. Developing new methods and techniques to study treatments, causes, and conditions of PAH could have wider implications for the study of disease, in general. Kaw’s research has to do with precision medicine — the idea that therapeutics could be tailored to an individual’s physiology, rather than using a standard treatment for all patients.

For PAH, Kaw and her team will be able to study individual patients’ cells in the bioprinted vessel model, which could help assess what type of therapy would be most effective for them specifically. This means scientists like Kaw don’t actually need a patient’s lung cells from a biopsy; instead, other cells like a skin cell sample can be transformed into a person’s lung cell. As Kaw continues to refine this method, the vessel she engineered could be adapted into other types of vessels for the study of other types of disease. “The ultimate goal for this project would be to be able to influence prognosis as well as diagnostics and therapeutics,” she said.

Cardiology is a male-dominated field, Kaw acknowledged. “I purposely chose to be at a program where there are a lot of women in leadership,” she said, “because it shows me we’re valued.” Kaw credits mentorship as a foundational part of her journey in science, from the time she was a high schooler volunteering in research labs, to her undergraduate and graduate work, to her current role as a cardiology research fellow at Emory University School of Medicine.

She emphasized the power of role models in being able to picture oneself in a space: “You might feel, as a woman, intimidated to go into a very time-intensive profession like surgery. But if you see a female surgeon who is successful, who loves her job, who has the things in life that you also want in addition to being a surgeon, suddenly the path feels open.” Kaw even has role models within her family: her mother worked as a research scientist, her father is a physician, and her paternal grandmother was an OB-GYN in India in the 1950s. Kaw’s younger sister, Anita, is also a physician-researcher at Emory University School of Medicine, where the sisters support one another.

Kaw is currently mentoring five undergraduates, not wanting to turn anyone who was interested away from her lab, and as a mentor, she is as methodical and deliberate as she is as a researcher. Kaw is also one of five 2025 awardees of the L’Oréal USA For Women in Science in Program. The award will enable her to conduct more bioprinting research, as well as provide support for her undergraduate researchers. While it’s standard for undergraduates working in a lab to learn technical skills like how to use a pipette properly, Kaw goes beyond that to train students in two areas she sees as critical to long term success in a research career: the experimental method and scientific writing.

“If you want to succeed in science, you do need to have the scientific method down,” she explained. Focusing on scientific writing also allows her mentees to learn how to eventually present their own research. “I want all of my undergraduate students to present their work in the form of an abstract or a poster. I want them to go to conferences. I want them to network with people who are like them at their stage, and people who can serve as potential mentors as well, so that they can be introduced to the field from different people’s perspectives,” Kaw said.