Prof. Ming-Hua Ho is a prominent academic and researcher in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST). She will hold the position of Chairperson of the department since Aug 2024 and has been a Professor since 2016. Prof. Ho earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from National Taiwan University in 2005. Her research interests encompass biomaterials, tissue engineering, controlled release, and 3D printing. Prof. Ho's contributions to the field are recognized through numerous awards, including the Honorable Award at the 2022 Chemical Engineering Annual Meeting in Taiwan and so on.

In addition to her academic roles, Prof. Ho serves as a board member of the Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering Society of Taiwan and the Chitin and Chitosan Society of Taiwan. She is also a council member of the Taiwan Membrane Society. She has actively participated in organizing several significant international conferences and symposia and has delivered numerous invited speeches globally.

Prof. Ho's extensive publication record includes articles in high-impact journals on topics such as 3D-printed gastric models, antibacterial nanofibers, and osteoconductive chitosan nanofibers. Her ongoing research continues to advance the fields of chemical engineering and biomaterials.

Prof. Ho's lab. has been dedicated to developing photocurable biomedical resins for 3D printing. She developed a resin formula with significantly higher biocompatibility than commercially available light- cured materials. Currently, Her lab. can control the Young's modulus in a range of 1000 times, elongation in a range of 200 times, and maximum tensile strength in a range of 100 times. Furthermore, through process improvements, she can synthesize and purify photocurable oligomers under a water-containing environment, significantly reducing production costs by 90%. With the flexible photo-resin, her team developed flexible grippers with sensing capabilities using 3D printing, and collaborated with Brightenoptix to conduct 3D printing tests for ocular prosthetic molds. Her team also collaborated with the Rapid 3D Printing Center at NTUST and shoe manufacturers ASO and Pou-Chen to develop a series of procedures for customizing 3D-printed shoe soles, including foot scanning, computational modeling, and rapid printing. Starting in 2020, she further collaborated with the National Taiwan University (NTU) and LifeStar, a silk fibroin development company, for industry-academia cooperation. The resin formula has been confirmed, and the process validation is ongoing through the A+ program. Related products entered trial production in 2022. Over the past three years, her team has applied for (including granted and pending) five patents related to resin and 3D printing technologies, including a method for preparing a single-layer purple membrane chip, a resin vat base for 3D printing, an elastic substrate pressure-sensing element with a porous structure, a flexible gripper mechanism, a cell scaffold, and a photocurable resin composition for ultrasonic phantom and preparation method thereof. Additionally, a patent for a 3D- printed piezoelectric bracket is being prepared, with plans for application in 2023.

Prof. Ho started by controlling polymer phase separation and attempted to develop a simple, low- cost, and highly applicable method to prepare tissue engineering scaffolds and drug delivery carriers. This method allows for more effective control of pore size, energy and time-saving compared to traditional methods, making it more suitable for large-scale development. This method has been granted a Taiwan-US patent, and related research has been published in the top-ranked journal Biomaterials in the field of Materials-Biomaterials, with over two hundred citations to date. Furthermore, she applied this process to prepare non-symmetrically induced guided tissue regeneration membranes (GTR membranes), and this research has been published in the journal Carbohydrate Polymers in the top 5% category. Since 2021, she combined our early-established phase separation technique and photocurable 3D printing materials to introduce suitable media into the resin to trigger non-solvent-induced phase separation (NIPS) during 3D printing. This process does not affect the printing efficiency and enables the formation of different scales of microstructures simultaneously.

In addition to developing tissue engineering scaffolds with micrometer-sized pores, Prof. Ho has also been exploring the development of scaffolds with submicron or nanoscale structures and analyzing the effects of submicron grooves and nanofibers on bone cell differentiation. From 2017 to 2019, she designed nanofiber scaffolds with multi-drug release functionality, allowing the release of specific drugs at different time points as needed. This material has been applied as a guided tissue regeneration membrane for periodontal disease treatment. From 2019 to 2021, she collaborated with the Dental Department of the National Taiwan University Hospital on research projects related to nanofiber scaffolds with multi-drug release properties. From 2020 to 2022, she collaborated with the Department of Medical Chemistry at Taipei Medical University to develop nanofibers with photothermal sterilization properties.

Starting in 2020, Prof. Ho collaborated with the Clive Chen Clinic to develop ultrasound microsurgery phantoms. Compared to current commercial phantoms, this project introduces 3D printing technology to create more realistic appearances for the phantoms. This novel phantom was used as a teaching tool in the "Spine and Peripheral Nerve Ultrasound Workshop".

Based on Prof. Ho's extensive research expertise in 3D printing materials, her team will establish the photo-responsive characterization curve for Dr. Gupta's azobenzene-derived chemicals and then develop an economical and efficient formulation for photo-curing 3D printing. By optimizing the printing parameters, they will identify the operation curve of the azobenzene-based hydrogel for 3D printing. Prof. Ho will take charge of designing and fabricating specific and multi-functional drug delivery devices. The formulation development will be facilitated by utilizing the customized 3D printer at NTUST. Lastly, Prof. Ho's wealth of experience in academic-industry collaborations will prove instrumental in promoting the project's outcomes for clinical biomedical applications.