Pamela (Pam) Cai is a 5th year PhD student in chemical engineering at Stanford University co-advised by Prof. Andrew Spakowitz and Prof. Sarah Heilshorn. She combines theory and experiments to investigate the essential physics within biopolymer-based materials and leverages the physical understanding to inform disease treatment and engineer better biomaterials. She was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2019 and the Stanford Bio-X Interdisciplinary Fellowship in 2019. Pam received her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from MIT in 2016.