Noor Momin, Stephenson Foundation Term Assistant Professor of Innovation
While growing up, Noor Momin, who joined the Department of Bioengineering in January as the Stephenson Foundation Term Assistant Professor of Innovation, imagined becoming a physician. Becoming a doctor seemed like a tangible way for someone interested in science to make a difference. Not until college did she realize the impact she could have as a bioengineer instead.
“I was taping microscope slides together,” Momin recalls of her initial experience as an undergraduate researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. “I didn’t even know what a Ph.D. was.”
It wasn’t until co-authoring her first paper, which explores how lipids, the water-repelling molecules that make up cell membranes (and also fats and oils), can switch between more fluid and less fluid arrangements, that Momin understood the degree to which bioengineering can influence medicine. “Someone could potentially use that paper for drug design,” Momin says.
As Momin sees it, the conventional wisdom of treating the heart like a mechanical pump, whose pipes can be replaced or whose throughput can be treated to prevent clogging in the first place, overshadows the immune system’s critical role in the development of heart disease.
Katherine (Katie) Reuther, Ph.D., M.B.A. will return to Penn Engineering in July 2021 as the new Executive Director of Penn Health-Tech (PHT) and as Practice Associate Professor in Bioengineering. Reuther is an alumna of Penn Bioengineering, having obtained her Ph.D. at Penn in the laboratory of Louis Soslowsky, Fairhill Professor in Bioengineering and Orthopaedic Surgery.
“Dr. Reuther is a role model for biomedical innovation, linking formal training in engineering and entrepreneurship with deep practical experience in leading technologies through the commercialization pipeline. Dr. Reuther graduated with her Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering, Magna cum Laude, from the College of New Jersey; she obtained her Ph.D. in Bioengineering at Penn in the laboratory of Dr. Louis Soslowsky and completed her MBA at Columbia, where she currently is a Senior Lecturer in Design, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. During her tenure at Columbia, Dr. Reuther helped create and led Columbia’s Biomedical Engineering Technology Accelerator (BiomedX), overseeing more than 60 technologies leading to $80M in follow-on funding and 18 licenses to start-ups or start-ups industry. Introducing both new courses and a new curriculum in biomedical innovation, Dr. Reuther was recently awarded Columbia’s highest teaching honor, the ‘2021 Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching,’ this Spring as a recognition of her excellence in teaching and dedication to students.
Katie has extensive experience in developing and translating early-stage medical technologies and discoveries and providing formal educational training for aspiring medical entrepreneurs. Dr. Reuther served as Director of Masters’ Studies for the Department of Biomedical Engineering and spearheaded the development of a graduate-level medical innovation program, including an interdisciplinary course available to scientists, engineers, and clinicians. Dr. Reuther provided advising and educational support to more than 100 student/faculty teams and start-ups, as they worked to develop and commercialize medical technologies. She will bring these extensive skills to PHT and Penn Bioengineering in two new, hands-on graduate courses in medical innovation centered around Penn Health-Tech ventures.”
We are thrilled to announce the appointment of Ning Jenny Jiang, Ph.D. as the tenured Peter & Geri Skirkanich Associate Professor of Innovation in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Jenny Jiang comes to Penn from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. She obtained her Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology and did her postdoctoral training at Stanford University.
Jiang’s research focuses on systems immunology by developing technologies that enable high-throughput, high-content, single cell profiling of T cells in health and disease and she is recognized as one of the leading authorities in systems immunology and immunoengineering. She is a pioneer in developing tools in biophysics, genomics, immunology, and informatics and applying them to study systems immunology in human diseases. Her early work on the development of the first high-throughput immune-repertoire sequencing technology opened up a brand new field of immune-repertoire profiling. Her laboratory developed the first high-throughput in situ T cell receptor affinity measurement technology and she pioneered the development of integrated single T cell profiling technologies. These technological innovations have changed the paradigm of T cell profiling in disease diagnosis and in immune engineering for therapeutics. Using these technologies, her laboratory has made many discoveries in immunology, from unexpected infants’ immunity in malaria infection to “holes” in T cell repertoire in aging immune systems in elderly, from dysregulated T cells in HIV infection to high-throughput identification of neoantigen-specific T cell receptor for cancer immunotherapy.
Dr. Jiang was also recently elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows for her outstanding contributions to the field of systems immunology and immunoengineering and devotion to the success of women in engineering. A virtual induction ceremony was held on March 26, 2021.
Additionally, Jiang is a recipient of numerous other awards, including the Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award, an NSF CAREER award, and a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Neurodegeneration Challenge Network Ben Barres Early Career Acceleration Award. She was selected as one of National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine Scholars in 2019.
Jiang’s appointment will begin June 1, 2021. Welcome to Penn Bioengineering, Dr. Jiang!
N.B.: Edited 7/2/21 with full endowed chair title.
Manuela Teresa Raimondi was appointed Visiting Professor in Bioengineering in the Associated Faculty of the School of Engineering and Applied Science for the 2020-2021 academic year. Raimondi received her Ph.D. in Bioengineering in 2000 from Politecnico di Milano, Italy. She is currently a Full Professor of Bioengineering at Politecnico di Milano in the Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering “G. Natta”, where she teaches the course “Technologies for Regenerative Medicine” in the Biomedical Engineering graduate program.
Raimondi is the founder and Director of the Mechanobiology Lab and of the Interdepartmental Live Cell Imaging lab. She has pioneered the development of cutting edge tools for cell modelling, ranging from micro-engineered stem cell niches, to miniaturized windows for in vivo intravital imaging, to microfluidic culture systems to engineer tissue-equivalents and organoids for cell modelling and drug discovery. Her platforms are currently commercialized by her start-up, MOAB srl. Her research is funded by the European Research Council (ERC), by The National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs), by the European Commission, and by the European Space Agency.
“Getting to Penn was quite the challenge with the various travel restrictions and the pandemic, but I am used to overcoming adverse odds and I am really excited to be here now,” says Dr. Raimondi. “In this challenging time, when many new barriers are coming up, I think building bridges and new scientific collaborations is even more important. I very much look forward to being part of the Penn research community.”
Dr. Raimondi with host Riccardo Gottardi, PhD on Smith Walk
During her sabbatical at Penn, Raimondi is investigating her hypothesis that stem cells pluripotency reprogramming can be guided by mechanical cues. Over the past five years, she has cultured many different stem cell types in the “Nichoids,” the synthetic stem cell niche she developed, and gathered robust evidence on how physical constraints at the microscale level upregulate pluripotency. Raimondi is hosted in the Bioengineering and Biomaterials Lab of Riccardo Gottardi, Assistant Professor in Bioengineering and in Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine, where she is helping to refine human stem cell sources that could be minimally manipulated for translational tissue engineering for a safe and effective use in regenerative therapies, as a key issue for clinical translation is the maintenance or enhancement of multipotency during cell expansion without exogenous agents or genetic modification.
“Dr. Raimondi is a trailblazer in Italy in regenerative medicine who has introduced many new concepts in a sometimes musty academic environment and has shattered a number of glass ceilings,” says Dr. Gottardi. “I think her sabbatical at Penn is a great opportunity for her and for the Penn community to build new and exciting trans-Atlantic collaborations.”
The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania is excited to welcome César de la Fuente, Ph.D., as an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering. De la Fuente, who is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Microbiology in the Perelman School of Medicine and was recently named a Penn Presidential Professor, is the principal investigator of the de la Fuente Lab with current projects including the development of computer-made antibiotics, microbiome engineering technologies, and synthetic neuromicrobiology tools.
Dr. de la Fuente has wanted to learn the mysteries of the world around him from a young age, from the origins of life and human consciousness to how diseases can affect the body. His dream of understanding the building blocks of life began to take shape when he enrolled as a graduate student at the University of British Columbia to study microbiology, immunology, and protein engineering. After earning his Ph.D. in these subjects, de la Fuente went on to complete a post doctorate in synthetic biology and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Recently, MIT recognized Dr. de la Fuente on its “35 Innovators Under 35” list, which honored de la Fuente as one of the world’s top 35 innovators and as a pioneer for his use of technology to improve antibiotics. Furthermore, GEN recently listed Dr. de la Fuente on its “Top 10 Under 40” list of young leaders in the life sciences, noting his development of transformative biotechnologies as a potential solution to antibiotic resistance. De la Fuente refers to this latest research as “Machine Biology,” a crossover of life and technology that “brings together elements of machines in order to computerize biological systems.”
His creativity in the merging of so many domains of science echoes throughout de la Fuente’s general approach to research and academia as well. While he emphasizes a thinking-from-the-ground-up approach, he also feels that “heterogeneous groups make better ideas,” and thus strives to maintain diversity in his lab — currently his entire lab is made up of international students and postdocs. In the future, de la Fuente hopes to extend his love of mentorship to the classroom in a course exploring the intersection of microbiology and synthetic biology, overlapping in a way similar to his research. We can’t wait for all of the innovation and creativity in engineering that de la Fuente will undoubtedly bring to our department.
Dr. Shaffer’s research is is focused on understanding how differences present in single-cells can generate phenotypes such as drug resistance in cancer, oncogenesis, differentiation, and invasion. Our approach leverages cutting-edge technologies including high-throughput imaging, single-molecule RNA FISH, fluorescent protein tagging, CRISPR/Cas9 screening, and flow cytometry to investigate rare single-cell phenomena. Further information can be found at www.sydshafferlab.com.
In addition to her exciting research, Dr. Shaffer will be an enthusiastic new member of the Bioengineering Department community. In the short term, she will be taking over the popular class BE 400 (Preceptorships in Bioengineering) which gives undergraduates the rare chance to shadow renowned physicians over a period of ten weeks. She will also serve as a faculty advisor as well as a mentor to the lucky students in her classes and lab.
Dr. Shaffer says that, “With my research interests and training at the interface of engineering and medicine, I am thrilled to be part of the highly interdisciplinary community of Penn Bioengineering.”
“Sydney has a unique combination of creativity and impact in her work,” says Solomon R. Pollack Professor and Chair Dr. David Meaney. “Her work to untangle the secrets of how single cancer cells can develop resistance to a cancer drug — therefore leading to a return of the cancer — is nothing short of stunning. We are incredibly fortunate to have her on our faculty. ”
We are thrilled to announce the successful recruitment of three (!) new faculty members to the department. We conducted a national faculty search and could not decide on one — we wanted all three of our finalists! We are very happy that they chose Penn and think we can provide an amazing environment for their education and research programs.
Alex Hughes, Ph.D.
Alex Hughes, Ph.D., will join us in the Spring 2018 semester. Dr. Hughes comes to us from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he is a postdoctoral fellow. Alex’s research regards determining what he calls the “design rules” underlying how cells assemble into tissues during development, both to better understand these tissues and to engineer methods to build them from scratch
Lukasz Bugaj, Ph.D.
Lukasz Bugaj, Ph.D., will arrive in the Spring 2018 semester. Dr. Bugaj is also coming here from UCSF following a postdoc, and his work is in the field of optogenetics — a scientific process whereby light is used to alter protein conformation, thereby giving one a tool to manipulate cells. In particular, Lukasz’s research has established the ability to induce proteins to cluster ‘on demand’ using light, and he wants to use these and other new technologies he invented to study cell signaling in stem cells and in cancer.
Mike Mitchell, Ph.D.
Mike Mitchell, Ph.D., will also join us in the Spring 2018 semester after finishing his postdoctoral fellowship at MIT in the Langer Lab. In his research, Dr. Mitchell seeks to engineer cells in the bone marrow and blood vessels as a way of gaining control over how and why cancer metastasizes. Mike’s work has already had impressive results in animal models of cancer. His lab will employ tools and concepts from cellular engineering, biomaterials science, and drug delivery to fundamentally understand and therapeutically target complex biological barriers in the body.
In the coming month, we’ll feature podcasts of interview with each of the new faculty members, as well as with Konrad Kording, so be sure to keep an eye out for those.
