C. Wyatt Shields IV

Charles Wyatt Shields IV is an American biomedical engineer and assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. His research involves the rational design of colloidal and supracolloidal particles for applications in drug delivery and biosensing.

Education
C. Wyatt Shields IV received a Bachelor of Science with High Distinction in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia graduating in 2011. There he performed undergraduate research with Jeffrey Saucerman and William Walker. He continued his education and research with Gabriel López as a graduate student in Biomedical Engineering at Duke University where he obtained his PhD in 2016. During the attainment of his PhD, Shields studied magnetic and acoustic methods for isolation and analysis of cells.

Career
Shields his continued with postdoctoral research at North Carolina State University where he worked with Orlin Velev and Stefan Zauscher in 2017 and then at Harvard University with Samir Mitragotri in 2018. At Harvard's Wyss Institute, Shields developed cytokine-releasing macrophage "backpacks" that maintain a tumor-killing state in cells, travel to tumor sites, and slow their growth.

Shields became an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2020 in chemical and biological engineering. He is also an affiliate professor in the biomedical engineering program and in the materials science and engineering programs. Working at the intersection of materials, soft matter physics and bioengineering, Shields has focused on understanding how stimuli-responsive particles behave in physiological settings in controlling their assembly and motion for biological applications. His lab has numerous clinical collaborations. Current research includes investigating the role of immune cells in decompression sickness using lung-on-a-chip devices, developing "bottom-up" multifunctional magnetic microrobots, and using acoustically responsive particles for capture and purification of disease biomarkers.

Shields' early career has been highly successful, with numerous high profile awards, 5 patents filed, and over 40 articles published in journals such as Science Advances, Advanced Materials, Advanced Functional Materials, and Journal of Controlled Release. Additionally, he is a Guest Associate Editor for the journal Bioengineering & Translational Medicine.

Shields' career has distinguished itself also for is his commitment to scientific outreach and mentorship. His group for several years, has worked with a local high school to provide engineering problems related to his lab's work in drug delivery and biosensing, permitting students the opportunity to design prototypes and work on real life engineering problems. Shields also has been recognized for his mentorship of students of diverse and underrepresented backgrounds while working under Dr. Gabriel López in 2016.

Awards and honors
In his third year at the University of Colorado Boulder, Shields received five distinguished research awards, including a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program award, Pew Biomedical Scholars award,  Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, and an NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA). Shields is one of only 20 recipients of the prestigious Packard Fellowship at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Other awards and honors include:


 * CU Boulder Lab Venture Challenge Awardee (2022)
 * Outreach Partner of the Year, Northglenn High School (2022)
 * Beckman Young Investigator Award Finalist (2022)
 * NIH Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant Award (2021)
 * Best On-Demand Talk by the Controlled Release Society (2020)
 * Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring, Duke University (2016)
 * NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2012)
 * NSF Research Triangle MRSEC Fellowship (2011)