Dylan Mostert

Post doc

Dr. ir. Dylan Mostert has graduated in Biomedical Engineering with a specialization in Soft Tissue Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology. During her master, she performed her graduation project at the National University of Galway, Ireland, investigating the interplay between Notch signaling and mechanosensing in cardiomyocytes derived from induced pluripotent stem cells. 

She then pursued a PhD in Soft Tissue Engineering and Mechanobiology at Eindhoven, where she gained extensive experience in developing human in vitro models of varying complexities to study cardiac cell mechanobiology. Her research primarily focused on  unraveling the mechanisms governing the structural organization of the myocardium.

Following her PhD, Dylan joined the Developmental Cardiovascular Biology lab of prof. Jonathan Butcher at Cornell University. There, she explored the mechanobiological factors driving the development of structural anisotropy in the myocardium of chicken embryos.

Since October 2024, Dylan has joined the Department of Cardiology under the supervision of dr. Martina Calore, working within the research group of prof. Leon de Windt. As part of the IMPACT consortium, she develops preclinical models of arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy (ACM) to investigate genotype-phenotype relationships. Additionally, her research explores non-coding RNA modulation as a potential therapeutic strategy for ACM.

Dylan has been awarded the Open Competition XS and Rubicon grants from the Dutch Science Organization (NWO) for her work on the mechanobiology of stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes. With this funding, she will spend 2025-2027 at the DWI-Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials (Aachen, Germany) under the supervision of prof. Laura de Laporte. Her Rubicon-funded project focuses on enhancing heart attack recovery by developing injectable, instructive hydrogels that integrate with cardiomyocytes derived from stem cells to improve structural anisotropy, electromechanical coupling, and myocardial tissue integration. Through the Open Science XS grant, Dylan supervises a research technician in the group of prof. Leon de Windt at CARIM who investigates how the maturity of human stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes influences their ability to form mechanical connections and respond to mechanical stimuli.