Seminar Series
“Microenvironment Matters: Aging, Oxygen, and Radiation in Bone-Tendon Regeneration”
Katie Hixon, PhD
Assistant Professor of Engineering
Dartmouth College
Abstract: Aging and radiation create biological conditions in which musculoskeletal tissues heal poorly or fail altogether. Disruptions in oxygen availability, vascularization, and cellular stress responses limit regeneration across tendon, bone, and the bone-tendon interface. Understanding how these altered microenvironments constrain healing is critical for developing effective regenerative strategies. Age-related impairments in tendon healing are closely linked to changes in oxygen tension and senescence-driven dysfunction. Modulation of tissue oxygenation using hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) provides insight into how regenerative signaling can be altered in aged tendon systems. At the bone-tendon interface, successful repair depends on coordinated spatial gradients in mechanics and biology that are particularly susceptible to aging-related disruption. In irradiated bone, persistent DNA damage, vascular loss, and senescence create an especially hostile environment that severely limits regeneration, motivating the development of biomaterial-based approaches to support vascularization and functional repair. Across these systems, regenerative failure emerges not from a lack of regenerative capacity, but from microenvironmental constraints. Strategies that explicitly address oxygenation, cellular stress, and tissue context offer a path toward improved healing in aging and injured musculoskeletal tissues.
Bio: Dr. Katie Hixon is an Assistant Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth College and a Clinical Assistant Professor of Orthopaedics at the Geisel School of Medicine. She earned her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Saint Louis University, where her research focused on tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, with an emphasis on scaffold-based strategies for musculoskeletal and craniofacial repair. She completed postdoctoral training in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, where she was awarded an NIH F32 Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award to study bone healing and develop clinically relevant preclinical models for therapeutic evaluation. Dr. Hixon leads the Dartmouth Tissue Engineering Laboratory, an NIH-funded research program focused on developing regenerative biomaterials and therapeutic strategies for musculoskeletal tissues that heal poorly due to aging, injury, and clinical interventions such as radiation. Her work integrates scaffold design, microenvironmental modulation, and in vivo modeling to improve regeneration of bone, tendon, and their interfaces, with the long-term goal of advancing translational solutions that restore function and improve quality of life for patients with complex orthopaedic and craniofacial injuries.
For a zoom link please contact Kate Harrison at kharrison@wpi.edu