Department of Chemical Engineering Hosts Zhiling Guo, a BIRMAC Fellow, for a Chemeng Special Lecture – All Invited

About the lecture:

Environmental pollution is a leading, yet under‑recognized, driver of global morbidity and mortality. Dr. Guo’s research adopts a One Health framework—integrating human clinical samples, animal models, and physiologically‑relevant in vitro organ‑on‑chip platforms—to trace how diverse pollutants cross biological barriers and initiate adverse effects across the lifespan. Organ‑on‑chip models are crucial because they replicate human barrier physiology with high fidelity, enabling quantitative assessment of pollutant translocation kinetics, cellular uptake, and downstream toxicity in a controlled, ethically responsible manner. Dr. Guo’s group have recently developed a blood-brain barrier model to quantify nanomaterial and microplastic transfer into brain compartments and elucidate impacts on brain function. Complementing this, they are also establishing placenta barrier and heart‑on‑chip models to map particle pollutant crossing under physiologically relevant flow conditions, and to quantify microplastic transfer into foetal compartments and elucidate impacts on placental function and early developmental endpoints and cardiomyocyte dysfunction. These integrated barrier models have revealed that particles can breach multiple human barriers and drive tissue‑specific inflammatory and oxidative stress responses. Collectively, these work provide mechanistic, human‑relevant evidence of pollutant entry and toxicity that informs risk assessment, underpins regulatory policy, and guides the design of safer materials to protect public health.

Event details:

DATE: Monday, May 26, 2025
TIME: 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM EST

Location: BSB 108

Optional for all chemical engineering graduate students. 

About Dr. Gou:

Dr. Zhiling Guo is an assistant professor in the School of Geography, Earth & Environmental Science at the University of Birmingham. She is an environmental toxicologist interested in understanding the connection between human exposure to pollutants and life-long health, and the potential underlying mechanisms. Her research also focuses on establishing the 3R alternatives as enabling technologies to facilitate investigation of the human and environmental impacts of pollution, and to link across different research areas. She is also interested in understanding the effects of pollutants on ecosystems, and developing biosensors to detect the traditional and emerging pollutants in the environmental and biological samples.

Dr. Guo is currently leading three UKRI and EU‑funded projects—including TENAP, EMBRACE, and SMART. Dr Guo is an active member of the NERC Peer Review College, serves as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Toxicology, and is Guest Editor for Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety. She has published over 90 peer-reviewed publications in top journals in her field.

Before joining in University of Birmingham, Dr. Guo worked in McGill University as postdoc and did her PhD project at University of Connecticut.