Eva Mueller needed a 3D bioprinter for her research, but her mentor didn’t have one. What’s a PhD student going to do?
Build one, of course.
When Eva Mueller, PhD, decided she wanted to move her research focus into bioprinting, her mentor was supportive, but told her he didn’t have the resources that she would need for her research—specifically a bioprinter.

“Well, I can make one,” Mueller said.
She did. It was her first 3D bioprinter.
That 3D printer–which still works–officially launched Mueller on her quest to bring scientific innovations to the patients they’re intended to help. It was a journey that would bring her from Hamilton, Ontario to Winston-Salem, North Carolina and from working at a startup to a first-of-its-kind subsidiary of an international digital services company.
One of the lessons that Mueller learned along the way was that, to bridge the gap between research and the human impact of that research–as well as to be a woman in STEM fields—you have to be proactive, a self-starter, willing to take the initiative. At each stage in her career, Mueller has been looking ahead toward her ultimate goal of changing healthcare on the patient level.
“I’m an engineer who wants to impact patients, who wants to make a difference in healthcare,” Mueller says. “It excites me every single day to work on projects and products that help people. That’s what it means to be at the interface of engineering and healthcare.”
How does 3D printing impact healthcare?
Today, Mueller, a biomedical engineer, is fulfilling a lifelong dream to improve healthcare as the research and development manager at RICOH 3D for Healthcare Innovation Studio. The Innovation Studio is the first FDA-cleared point of care 3D printing facility in the U.S., located in One Technology Place in the Innovation Quarter as part of Sparq Labs.

That’s a mouthful, but what it means is that the group is on the frontlines of taking innovative techniques like 3D printing and applying them directly to patients to improve their medical care. They do this by locating near where medical care is being given (which is what “point of care” means) and the medical products developed in the facility are cleared to be used in treatment of patients as they are needed (which is what “FDA-cleared” indicates).
RICOH 3D for Healthcare is a subsidiary of Ricoh, a large, international digital services company that focuses on improving access to personalized medical devices. This unit combines the company’s long-standing reputation in printing services with the cutting-edge science of anatomical modeling.
In 2024, RICOH 3D opened the Innovation Studio in the iQ, Ricoh’s first on-site facility integrated into a healthcare system, to better collaborate with the surgeons and physicians of the Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist system so that the use of personalized, 3D-printed medical devices for patient care could be easy and fast.
The value of 3D printed products is that they can reflect human anatomy and be matched to an individual patient’s case and help guide how doctors and surgeons treat that patient.
“Let’s say two people are going into the same orthopedic surgery–that surgery is not going to look the same for them,” Mueller says. “Personalized medical products reflect a specific person’s anatomy and essentially help surgeons prep for the surgery at hand and decrease operating room time.”

Reducing the time that patients spend in surgery is a bigger deal than it sounds and can have a host of benefits. Downstream effects of reduced surgical time include less complications, less use of anesthesia, less blood loss, and more. By helping surgeons better understand what they’re dealing with ahead of time, personalized medical products can reduce risks for patients.
In addition to the pre-surgical anatomical models, the RICOH 3D for Healthcare team also produces surgical guides for tumor resections and bone deformities (in partnership with Insight Surgery), and patient-specific products and solutions for oncology treatment, with many other projects also in development.
How does Mueller’s work improve patient care?
Mueller’s specific role as senior manager for research and development at RICOH 3D is more future-facing, looking down the road at what’s coming next for medical treatments that use 3D-printing techniques.
“We’re putting a lens to 3D-printed medical devices and asking, ‘How could medical care look in five to 10 years? What can we do now to help the next wave of personalized products move forward?’” Mueller says.
Mueller leads the charge to develop Ricoh’s next big thing in patient care. She collaborates with various teams to work on new products and services from idea to production. Her work helps make sure that products in development are meeting real clinical needs and expands the portfolio of products that the Innovation Studio can offer medical professionals to improve care for patients.
For example, Mueller and the R&D team are working on expanding their contributions to cancer care by developing what they call a total care package. That package could include a presurgical model to identify the location of the tumor, a 3D printed guide to help with the surgery, and improved products and solutions for external radiation that match the patient’s specific anatomy.
This idea was born out of conversations with healthcare professionals to understand the gaps in the current solutions they have for treating cancer patients and includes validation activities that gather information needed for the FDA approval process.
“Projects like these are a big team effort,” Mueller says. “R&D plays an important role at the infancy of new product development and in strategizing the next steps for development.”
What excites Mueller the most about her work is the chance to help democratize the use of 3D printed products.
Generally, if a physician wants a personalized 3D model for a patient, they would first need to build a relationship with an academic or commercial research facility that not only has the expertise but also the equipment to create the model. Furthermore, if their models aren’t cleared by the FDA, its use would be considered experimental and limit how it can be used. In contrast, the Innovation Studio has FDA clearance, so its models are ready to go.
“This facility is the first of–hopefully–many,” Mueller says. “There’s tons of effort being made to place these kinds of facilities in other major hospital networks and spread them around the country.”

Some of the 3D printing techniques have been around for a while now, but it has taken time for them to be translated into patient care. By placing facilities like these around the country, Ricoh ensures the medical products developed can be accessed by more people, a concept that Mueller calls “democratizing” medical product development. It means expanding access to these innovations for as many people as possible.
Also, by locating near Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist, one of the nation’s largest medical systems, the researchers at RICOH 3D can collaborate closely with the doctors and surgeons using their products and use their feedback to improve the development process.
“Being close to the end user is where I’ve always wanted to be,” Mueller says. “Those conversations with healthcare professionals are where I get really excited about bringing back their input and then working through all the details.”
Mueller’s journey to the interface between engineering and patient care was a long one–a journey that started as an undergraduate student attending school a bit north of Winston-Salem in Hamilton, Ontario.
How does a student from Canada become a cutting-edge researcher in Winston-Salem?
If you had met Mueller as a young girl, you might have thought she was destined for another career. While she thought she wanted to be a doctor, she was also deeply immersed in other activities, playing multiple instruments and participating in various sports. However, her love of math and science in school made engineering a logical progression when she started attending McMaster University.
“To me, engineering was a logical transition from high school to my post-high school journey,” Mueller says. “I didn’t have to specialize in chemical, civil, or mechanical engineering right in the start. That helped me dive deeper into engineering fundamentals.”
As Mueller made it deeper into her undergraduate studies, she decided that medical school was not the route for her. But she hadn’t lost her desire to impact patient care–it was just about to take another route.
Mueller distinctly remembers the day she was sitting in math class and decided that she wanted more lab experience, so she emailed some of her professors to ask what opportunities existed.
“I wanted to get my foot in the door of the research world,” Mueller says.
She heard back from one professor, who (spoiler alert) would end up being her supervisor for both her master’s and doctoral degree. He connected her to a doctoral student, who helped her get started in research work and became a mentor for her.

Mueller worked in a material science lab, which was conducting translation research, where they helped turn discoveries that haven’t been approved for medical care yet into human-safe innovations. The translation aspect appealed to her desire to work at the interface of research and healthcare.
“The research started from very simple tasks in the lab,” Mueller says, “But I started thinking, ‘Wow, this is really cool. I can see myself doing this as a career.’”
During her undergraduate years, Mueller spent her summers working in the lab and even spent one summer back in her home country of Germany doing an internship at RWTH Aachen University, where she learned about other lab environments. Her undergraduate work turned into her master’s, where she focused on controlled drug delivery, including the development of a novel polymer-based delivery system.
“There was a hospital close to the university, where I worked on a variety of projects,” Mueller says. “I was not the one doing the surgery or doing the procedure, but I could still heavily influence how that gets done.”
Those experiences were game changers for Muller. She wanted to work on research that improved how patients received medical treatment, at the intersection of engineering and healthcare.
“Ever since then, I was sold,” Mueller says.
After completing her master’s degree, Mueller had another decision to make. Did she take her love for research and go into industry, or did she dive further into research?
“When I thought about future work, I didn’t see myself solely working in a lab,” Mueller says. “I always saw myself making decisions inside a lab, leading a team in R&D–and those roles required a PhD.”

Mueller decided to keep going with her education, but she switched focus, delving into the world of bioprinting, which began with making her own 3D bioprinter.
“It was a really fun challenge to build my own 3D bioprinter and to use it throughout my PhD,” Mueller says.
That level of ingenuity and initiative would set the tone for her future work.
How do you get from building your own printer to impacting patients?
Mueller found work on her PhD in chemical engineering fascinating. She learned a lot about the materials of bioprinting, where biomaterial inks are combined with cells to print living tissue with a specialized printer, and Mueller established a lot of foundational knowledge. However, there was a component that she felt was missing in the work.
“My PhD was more on the fundamental side, but I was missing a bit of the translation side,” Mueller says. “I wanted to be closer to the patient.”
And that’s how Mueller ended up in Winston-Salem.
As she wrapped up her graduate research, Mueller went looking for an opportunity that would get her closer to impacting people. She found it through LinkedIn.

While exploring the wider world of 3D bioprinting, a company kept bubbling up–Brinter, a healthtech startup located in Winston-Salem.
“Brinter was one of the companies working in the world of 3D bioprinting and asking the question, ‘How do we utilize bioprinting and get a product out into healthcare?,” Mueller says
Brinter, which is part of the regenerative medicine hub growing in the iQ, develops 3D printing technologies that bioprint tissue implants that will one day replace damaged human tissue like tendons, ligaments, and–someday–organs. Mueller moved to Winston-Salem and joined the startup team in 2022.
“It was a huge opportunity for me to dive headfirst into the world of product development–not from a fundamental research side, but utilizing those tools that I learned in school and getting closer to a product that is ready to be used in healthcare,” Mueller says.

Mueller loved being a part of a startup, getting outside of her research bubble and jumping into medical product development, learning all the aspects that come with research and development–the business side, IP concerns, marketing, and investors, among others.
It was while working for Brinter that Mueller started to hear about the new kid on the block–RICOH 3D, which had opened in a nearby building in the iQ. Mueller did her homework, researching Ricoh and the work the company did. She felt like the research and development being done at Ricoh were the next logical step in working on products that could change how patients are treated right now.
“Ricoh had this amazing mindset, and I felt they were just even closer to the patient where I can really feel I can make a difference,” Mueller says.
In 2024, Mueller joined the RICOH 3D for Healthcare team.
While she loves the work she does, Mueller wants to do more–improving patient care isn’t the only place that Mueller wants to make a difference. She’s one of a generation of women in STEM careers who can see how they’ve benefited from the women who pioneered science before them–and who are eager to pay that legacy forward.

Why is it important to Eva Mueller to pay it forward?
During her education, Mueller experienced a landscape that was changing. There was more representation of women in her classes and faculty than many women who were a few years ahead of her in their STEM careers.
“I think we’re past the point of people telling girls ‘Oh, you can’t like math or science.’ That isn’t to say that the numbers were equal in my classes,” Mueller says, “but the gap is narrowing in academia.”
For Mueller, the thing that made the most difference in her journey early on were the mentors she found along the way.

“I’ve been very fortunate in having good mentorship,” Mueller says. “I think that’s largely why I’m here.”
Once Mueller moved from schooling to working, she saw that narrowing gap begin to widen again.
“Is the gap narrowing in industry? I don’t think so,” Mueller says. “I think there’s a lack of presence from an industry standpoint. There’s a lot of entry level roles for women in STEM that you can get into, but I personally believe that the lack of leadership roles for women is still something that is underrepresented.”
When it comes to the board room, it can be intimidating to be a woman–particularly a young woman–when the other people in the room are older and, well, more male than you.
For Mueller, that has always been more motivating than challenging.
“I take it as a challenge. I like to share my thoughts, my opinions, but others do feel intimidated by that,” Mueller says. “Having that misrepresentation can discourage others from pursuing those more leadership roles.”
Lack of representation never kept Mueller from reaching out to others, though.
“I love hearing from other women that have kind of climbed the ladder and hearing their perspectives,” Mueller says. “So I have reached out a few different times of just, ‘Hey, how did you do that? Or, ‘Wow, this is really neat. You’re running your own startup.’”
Mueller takes the initiative to reach out, and she remembers the feelings when other scientists and researchers took the time to speak with her, to answer her questions. She learned a lot from their perspectives and that helped her along her journey.

That’s why she makes time when she gets calls of her own.
“I’ve always lived by whatever I’ve gotten, pay it forward,” Mueller says. “I really feel that to make that gap shrink is for all the women in more leadership roles to take that extra step in mentoring younger women to show that this is possible. It’s kind of an internal mentorship that I believe can decrease that gap.”
It’s in that vein that Mueller feels that the challenges facing women–and others–in STEM fields can be combated.
“We need to encourage young women scientists to step outside to not think of themselves as a scientist that stays inside the lab all the time, to tell them that they can climb the ladder, too,” Mueller says.
By taking the initiative and looking ahead to the next step, Mueller has blazed a trail for herself to reach her goal of improving healthcare through innovative products and solutions. She is also taking the initiative to be the representation that other, younger scientists can be inspired by. And she’s not done yet.