Cassandra Clift, Ph.D., joins the MUSC Department of Surgery in the Division of Vascular Surgery, effective November 1, 2025.
Dr. Clift is a cardiovascular extracellular matrix biologist utilizing mass spectrometry techniques to evaluate cardiac valvular and vascular pathologies, therapeutic biomaterials, and engineered cardiovascular disease models.
She received her Bachelor of Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Biomedical Engineering and went on to obtain her PhD in 2021 in Biomedical Sciences the Medical University of South Carolina in the Department of Cell and Molecular Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.
Dr. Clift has been funded via NHLBI Predoctoral fellowships (T32, F31), the AHA Post-Doctoral Fellowship, and the NHLBI K99/R00 transition program.
During her post-doctoral work under the mentorship of Dr. Elena Aikawa Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, Dr. Clift focused on using multi-omics strategies and bioengineered models of calcific aortic valve disease to understand the role of biomechanics, cell-cell, and cell-ECM interactions on valve epigenetics and proteomics.
In her Assistant Professorship, she will investigate the role of N-glycosylation in extracellular vesicle mediated signaling in EV-ECM and EV-cell interactions.
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