Leigh Whitehorn, a rising senior working in Professor Billiar’s lab, was granted a National Science Foundation supplement award in the amount of $8,000. This award will fund her research on how mechanical forces allow heart valve cells to survive in very soft environments, where they would otherwise undergo programmed cell death. The fund will also allow her to attend the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Annual Meeting in Philadelphia in October, to present her findings. This work will contribute to a larger project, featured here, studying the factors that affect normal cell death in an environment that mimics the human body.