Ryan Porter, Ph.D.
Ryan Porter, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) with a secondary appointment in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. He earned degrees in Chemical Engineering from the University of Kentucky (BSc) and Virginia Tech (MSc, PhD), with a graduate program emphasis in Biomedical Engineering. He received his postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School with Prof. Christopher Evans at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). In 2012, he became research faculty in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at BIDMC. He joined UAMS in late 2017.
Research Focus:
My research areas of interest and expertise include: regenerative medicine, anterior cruciate ligament, articular cartilage, molecular imaging, mesenchymal stem cell, gene therapy, chondrocytes, cartilage repair, and preclinical models.
Current Projects:
My lab focuses on developing strategies to prevent articular cartilage degeneration or stimulate cartilage repair. Currently, we are pursuing two areas of research: one focused on improving the intra-articular delivery of therapeutics within synovial joints to prevent or treat osteoarthritis; the other on overcoming key bottlenecks to stimulating chondrogenesis within skeletal defects. These projects use mouse, rat, and rabbit models of bone and joint injury to help answer specific research questions. This work has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Klarman Family Foundation, the UAMS Bone and Joint Initiative, and the Arkansas Biosciences Institute.