Kathryn Grandfield Wins Arthur B. McDonald Fellowship for Atomic-Scale Biomaterials Research

As a heart valve sample came into focus under a microscope, Kathryn Grandfield understood what she wanted to do with her working life. She was in high school at the time, attending a materials engineering camp. One session was led by Diego Mantovani, an expert in biomaterials for regenerative and reparative medicine at Université Laval in Quebec City. His project explored why heart valves fail, and the campers were asked to examine samples and look for cholesterol buildup and defects.

Until then, Grandfield had considered a career in medicine. The microscope changed that. It showed her she could, as she puts it, create solutions to improve people's health as an engineer.

That early moment has grown into a career at McMaster University, where she is a leading materials science and engineering researcher and associate dean of graduate studies in the Faculty of Engineering. She holds a Tier-2 Canada Research Chair in Microscopy of Biomaterials and Biointerfaces, and her microscopy work has appeared on the covers of Physics Today, Nano Letters and ACS Nano. On Oct. 26, she was named one of this year's Arthur B. McDonald Fellows.

The fellowship goes to six early-stage researchers across Canada each year for transformative contributions to the natural sciences and engineering. Funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), it provides $250,000 to expand a lab and grow a research program, and it releases recipients from teaching and administrative duties. When an email arrived asking Grandfield to contact NSERC's president, she almost didn't believe it. She recalls saying out loud, "Oh my gosh, does this mean what I think?" The first person she wanted to tell was Carlos Filipe, the faculty's associate dean of research, who had nudged her to apply. After text messages and a chase around the John Hodgins Engineering Building, he found his way to her office and delivered what she calls the biggest high-five of her life.

Grandfield describes herself, titles aside, as a microscopist. The instruments she uses now are far from the tabletop model from camp; some fill an entire room and use X-rays, electrons and ion beams to reveal the internal structure of materials at high resolution. Using them together is called correlative microscopy. In her words, one tool can't give all the answers, but together they can look at the same region and move progressively smaller in scale.

That approach lets her lab see what bone is made of and how its internal structures are organized down to the atomic scale. Her team studies sections of bone roughly 700 times smaller than a strand of human hair. The process begins with X-ray analysis of the larger structure at a bone-implant interface, then moves into the material with electron and ion beam microscopes. The goal is to see exactly where an implant touches bone and how the two integrate, and to learn why a material performs as it does.

The motivation is biomimetic: taking inspiration from nature to solve engineering design problems. Her group aims to design better medical implants, such as seamless hip replacements and stronger dental implants. To replace bone tissue, she says, researchers first need to know what it actually looks like. That scale of analysis can show whether natural tissue recognizes and integrates with a device, or whether a new material works at all.

Her lab has found features in bone that people didn't know existed because they couldn't be seen at that length scale. With the fellowship, she wants to move beyond snapshots and watch the process in real time: how proteins interact with an implant's surface and how bone forms as it happens. Because most of these microscopes operate in a vacuum, her team uses a specially fabricated holder containing capsules with tiny channels of liquid and collagen fibrils, allowing her to observe bone forming from a liquid state. Her group has also developed a way to place fabricated biomaterials in the holder, mimicking conditions inside the body, so researchers can screen which materials work fastest or build the best bone coating. Some may call it a pipe dream, she says, but she wants to be known for big swings and good science.

Shortly after learning of the award, one of her students called her to the lab: they had imaged a particular protein for the first time, a result three years in the making. Her former students now work in industry and as professors around the world, and she hopes the fellowship helps her keep opening doors for them. It is the second straight year a McMaster engineer has won; Tohid Didar took the prize last year, and Todd Hoare earned the predecessor award, the NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship, in 2018, before it was renamed for McDonald.