 | Sangeeta N. Bhatia (guest editor), MD, PhD was born in the USA in 1968. She received her PhD from MIT in 1997 and her MD from Harvard Medical School in 1999, both in the US. After a post-doctoral stint at Massachusetts General Hospital, she joined the faculty of the University of California at San Diego in the Departments of Bioengineering and Medicine. Since 2005 she has been an Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She is the director of the Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies. Her work focuses on using micro- and nanotechnology tools to repair damaged tissues. She has been awarded the David and Lucile Packard Fellowship, the MIT TR100 Young Innovators Award, and been elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. She co-authored the first undergraduate textbook on tissue engineering, over 80 papers or patents, and is a frequent advisor to governmental organizations on cell-based sensing, nanobiotechnology, and tissue engineering. She has worked in industry at Pfizer, Genetics Institute, ICI Pharmaceuticals, and Organogenesis. |
 | Christoper Chen (guest editor): Christopher S. Chen, MD., PhD., is the Skirkanich Associate Professor of Innovation and Graduate Group Chair at the University of Pennsylvania Department of Bioengineering, a faculty member of the Cell Biology and Physiology Program and Cell Growth and Cancer Program, and Director of the Tissue Microfabrication Laboratory. The goal of Dr Chen's research is to identify the underlying mechanisms by which cells interact with materials and coordinate with each other to build tissues, and to apply this knowledge in the biology of stem cells, wound healing, tissue vascularization and cancer. Dr Chen has received numerous honors, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the Angiogenesis Foundation Fellowship, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, the Mary Hulman George Award for Biomedical Research, and the Herbert W. Dickerman Award For Outstanding Contribution to Science. He serves as a member of the Faculty of 1000 Biology, the Board of Trustees for the Society for BioMEMS and Biomedical Nanotechnology, Editor for BioInterphases, and Molecular and Cellular Biomechanics, and was a Fellow for the Defense Science Research Council, an advisory board serving the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He received his AB in Biochemistry from Harvard, MS in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, and PhD in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics from the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program. He earned his MD from the Harvard Medical School. He was Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering and in Oncology at Johns Hopkins University prior to his current appointment. |
 | Rashid Bashir completed his PhD from Purdue University in 1992. From October 1992 to October 1998 he worked at National Semiconductor in the Process Technology Development Group as Senior Engineering Manager. He is currently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University. His research interests include biomedical applications of micro and nanotechnology. |
 | David J. Beebe was born in the United States, in 1963. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994. He served on the faculty at Louisiana Tech University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before moving to the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2000. His current research interests center around understanding the role stem/progenitor cells play in the development of the mammary gland and the continued development of microtechnology for cell biology. |
 | Jon Cooper's research is in the field of Bioelectronics and Bioengineering in the Department of Electronics at the University of Glasgow. His group works in a broad range of technologies, including micro- and nanofabrication, soft and hard lithography, microscopy, optics and photonics, cell culture, biosensor technology and modelling. Professor Cooper has also been closely involved in the commercialisation of a number of these technologies. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2001 and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2004. He has published ca. 130 papers. |
 | Tejal Desai is currently Professor of Physiology and Bioengineering at the University of California, San Francisco. She is also a member of the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research and the UCSF/UC Berkeley Graduate Group in Bioengineering. She received the ScB degree in Biomedical Engineering from Brown University (Providence, RI) in 1994 and her PhD degree in bioengineering from the joint graduate program at University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco, in 1998. Dr Desai directs the Laboratory of Therapeutic Micro and Nanotechnology. Her research uses micro and nanofabrication strategies to create implantable biohybrid devices for cell encapsulation, targeted drug delivery, and templates for cell and tissue regeneration. In addition to authoring over 90 technical papers, she is presently an associate editor of Langmuir, Biomedical Microdevices, and Sensors Letters, and is editor of an encyclopedia on Therapeutic Microtechnology. She has chaired and organized several conferences and symposia in the area of bioMEMS, micro and nanofabricated biomaterials, and micro/nanoscale drug delivery/tissue engineering. |
 | Eric Gottwald was born in Germany, in 1963. He received his PhD in biology from the University of Cologne, Germany, in 1995. In 1996 he joined the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe as immediate Post-Doc. Since 1999 he has been research scientist at the Institute for Biological Interfaces and since 2000 he has lead the 3D-cell culture techniques group at the Institute for Biological Interfaces. His current research interests are: development of polymer chips for 3D-cell culture applications, development of surface modified polymers for the generation of an artificial stem cell niche, development of bioreactors and periphery for perfused 3D-cell cultures, and development of surface acoustic wave sensors for the detection of biologically relevant molecules. |
 | Ali Khademhosseini was born in Tehran, Iran in 1975. He was subsequently raised in Toronto, Canada. He received his PhD (2005) in bioengineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, and MASc (2001) and BASc (1999) degrees from the University of Toronto, Canada both in chemical engineering. In 2005 he joined the faculty of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and the Harvard Medical School. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Health Sciences and Technology. His current research interests are: micro- and nanoscale technologies to control cellular behavior, microfluidic, surface patterning, stem cell bioengineering, biomaterials, tissue engineering and drug delivery. He has received multiple awards including the Coulter Foundation Early Career (2006) and outstanding undergraduate research mentor at MIT (2004), and outstanding graduate student by Biomedical Engineering Society (2005). |
 | Robert S. Langer is one of 13 Institute Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has written over 900 articles and has more than 550 issued or pending patents worldwide. His patents have been licensed or sublicensed to over 180 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology and medical device companies; a number of these companies were launched on the basis of these patent licenses. He served as a member of the United States Food and Drug Administration's SCIENCE Board from 1995–2002 and as its Chairman from 1999–2002. His work is at the interface of biotechnology and materials science. A major focus is the study and development of polymers to deliver drugs, particularly genetically engineered proteins, DNA and RNAi, continuously at controlled rates for prolonged periods of time. Work is in progress in the following areas: Investigating the mechanism of release from polymeric delivery systems with concomitant microstructural analysis and mathematical modeling; studying applications of these systems including the development of effective long-term delivery systems for insulin, anti-cancer drugs, growth factors, gene therapy agents and vaccines; developing controlled release systems that can be magnetically, ultrasonically, or enzymatically triggered to increase release rates; synthesizing new biodegradable polymeric delivery systems which will ultimately be absorbed by the body; creating new approaches for delivering drugs such as proteins and genes across complex barriers in the body such as the blood–brain barrier, the intestine, the lung and the skin; researching new ways to create tissue and organs including creating new polymer systems for tissue engineering; stem cell research including controlling growth and differentiation; creating new biomaterials with shape memory or surface switching properties; angiogenesis inhibition. Dr Langer has received nearly 150 major awards including: the Charles Stark Draper Prize (2002); the Gairdner Foundation International Award; the Dickson Prize for Science (2002); Heinz Award for Technology, Economy and Employment (2003); the Harvey Prize (2003); the John Fritz Award (2003); the General Motors Kettering Prize for Cancer Research (2004); the Dan David Prize in Materials Science (2005); the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research (2005) and the Lemelson-MIT prize (1998). Dr Langer was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1989, and to both the National Academy of Engineering and to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. In 2006, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He has served, at various times, on 15 boards of directors and 30 Scientific Advisory Boards of such companies as Wyeth, Alkermes, Mitsubishi Pharmaceuticals, Warner–Lambert, and Momenta Pharmaceuticals. Dr Langer has received honorary doctorates from Yale University, the ETH (Switzerland), the Technion (Israel), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), the University of Liverpool (England), the University of Nottingham (England), Albany Medical College, the Pennsylvania State University, Northwestern University and Uppsala University (Sweden). He received his Bachelor's Degree from Cornell University in 1970 and his ScD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974, both in Chemical Engineering. |
 | Matthieu Piel was born in France, in 1973. He graduated in Physics (soft matter/liquid physics) from Ecole Polytechnique and Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France in 1997, and received a PhD in Cell Biology in 2001, for work on the centrosome of vertebrate cells with Michel Bornens, at Institut Curie, Paris, France. He then worked as a post-doctoral fellow on yeast chemotropism using microfluidic chambers, with Andrew Murray and in collaboration with George Whitesides, at Harvard University, Cambridge, USA, from 2002 to 2005. In 2005, he joined Institut Curie, in France, as a CNRS researcher. He has just started a new research group at Institut Curie, UMR 144 IC/CNRS. His current research interests are: quantitative cell biology and modeling, using micro-fabricated devices to study cell polarity and cell division, and in particular the role of the centrosome in these processes. |
 | Shuichi Takayama was born in Tokyo Japan, in 1968. He received his PhD in chemistry from The Scripps Research Institute at La Jolla, California, USA in 1998, and performed further postdoctoral studies as a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Fellow at Harvard University from 1998 to 2000. Towards the end of 2000 he joined the Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of Michigan as an assistant professor. Currently he is associate professor of Biomedical Engineering and the Macromolecular Science and Engineering Program. His current research interests are: Microfluidics, Nanofluidics, Biomaterials and surface engineering, Microscale tissue engineering, and Cellular micro-environomics. More specifically Braille display-based microfluidic systems, air–liquid two-phase microfluidic systems, tunable nanofluidics, fracture fabrication and materials patterning, in vitro fertilization on a chip, microfluidic tissue engineering of small airway injuries, subcellular signalling, and microscale stem cell niche engineering. |
 | Todd Thorsen was born in the USA in 1970. He received a Masters in Public Health in Infectious Disease/Immunity from U. C. Berkeley in 1997 and a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from Caltech in 2002. In 2002, he joined the faculty at MIT as an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering. His current research interests are: microfluidic device design, medical diagnostics, and low Reynolds number fluid modeling. |
 | Joe Tien was born in Boston, MA in 1976. He received a PhD in physics from Harvard University in 1999, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University from 1999 to 2001. He joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University in 2002. His research examines the quantitative physiology of engineered microvessels and methods to form microstructured biomaterials. |
 | Joel Voldman was born in France, in 1973. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusettts Institute of Technology, USA, in 2001, performed postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School in 2002. In 2002, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor. Currently he is an Associate Professor at MIT. His current research interests are: cell trapping, manipulation, and sorting using dielectrophoresis and optical forces; application of microfluidics and cell patterning to stem cell biology. |
 | Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic was born in Belgrade, Serbia. She received her PhD in Chemical Engineering in 1980 from the University of Belgrade in Serbia. In 1986–1987 she was a Fulbright Fellow at MIT, at the Department of Chemical Engineering. She was on the faculty of the School of Engineering at the University of Belgrade as an Assistant Professor, Associate Professor and Professor of Chemical Engineering until 1993, when she moved to Boston and joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University, where she directs the program in stem cells and tissue engineering. She also co-directs the NIH resource center for tissue engineering. Her laboratory currently works on biophysical regulation of stem cells, advanced bioreactors with spatial and temporal regulation of cell differentiation and tissue assembly, and functional tissue engineering for application in regenerative medicine. |
 | Mingming Wu was born in Mainland China in 1964. She received her PhD in Physics from the Ohio State University in the United States in 1992, and was a postdoctoral researcher in Ecole Polytechnique, France in 1992 and University of California at Santa Barbara in 1993–1995. In 1996 she joined the physics department at Occidental College in Los Angeles as an assistant/associate professor. Since 2003 she has held a joint appointment as an adjunct associate professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and School of Chemical and Molecular Engineering at Cornell University. Her current research interests are: Collective dynamics in living systems, biomicrofluidics, and quantitative imaging for biological systems. |
 | Hanry Yu was born in China, in 1964. He received his PhD in Cell Biology from Duke University, USA in 1994, and further training in Cell Biology and Biophysics from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Germany in 1996. In 1997 he joined the National University of Singapore as research scientist. Currently he is a tenured associate professor at the National University of Singapore, and group leader at the Institute of Bioengineering & Nanotechnology, A*STAR. His current research interests are: cell biology of endoplasmic reticulum dynamics in global and local protein synthesis; TGF-β1 in liver fibrosis resolution; micro-/nano-scale engineering and imaging of extra-cellular microenvironments for liver tissue engineering applications. |
