Jennifer Phillips-Cremins Featured in Nature’s ‘Technologies to Watch in 2020’

Jennifer Phillips-Cremins, Ph.D.

Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, recently reached out to a panel of researchers from a variety of fields, asking them what technological trends they see as having the most impact on their disciplines in the coming year.

Jennifer Phillips-Cremins, assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering, was among these panelists. As an expert in “3D epigenetics,” or the way the genome’s highly specific folding patterns influence how and when individual genes are expressed, she highlighted a slate of new techniques that will allow researchers to take a closer look at those relationships.

Read the full post at Penn Engineering blog. Media contact Evan Lerner.

Oncology/Engineering Review Published

oncology
Mike Mitchell, Ph.D.

Michael Mitchell, Ph.D., who will arrive in the Spring 2018 semester as assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering, is the first author on a new review published in Nature Reviews Cancer on the topic of engineering and the physical sciences and their contributions to oncology. The review was authored with Rakesh K. Jain, Ph.D., who is Andrew Werk Cook Professor of Radiation Oncology (Tumor Biology) at Harvard Medical School, and Robert Langer, Sc.D., who is Institute Professor in Chemical Engineering at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. Dr. Mitchell is currently in his final semester as a postdoctoral fellow at the Koch Institute and is a member of Dr. Langer’s lab at MIT.

The review focuses on four key areas of development for oncology in recent years: the physical microenvironment of the tumor; technological advances in drug delivery; cellular and molecular imaging; and microfluidics and microfabrication. Asked about the review, Dr. Mitchell said, “We’ve seen exponential growth at the interface of engineering and physical sciences over the last decade, specifically through these advances. These novel tools and technologies have not only advanced our fundamental understanding of the basic biology of cancer but also have accelerated the discovery and translation of new cancer therapeutics.”