Workshop Organizers

Markus Buehler, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; MRS Bulletin Impact Editor

Markus J. Buehler is the McAfee Professor of Engineering at MIT, a member of the Center for Materials Science and Engineering, and the Center for Computational Science and Engineering at the Schwarzman College of Computing. He has been involved with MRS in numerous roles, and currently serves as the Section Editor of MRS Bulletin Impact. In his research, Buehler pursues new modeling, design and manufacturing approaches for advanced biomaterials that offer greater resilience and a wide range of controllable properties from the nano- to the macroscale. His interests include a variety of functional biomaterial properties including mechanical, optical and biological, linking chemical features, hierarchical and multiscale structures, to performance in the context of physiological, pathological and other extreme conditions. His methods include molecular and multiscale modeling, design, as well as experimental synthesis and characterization. His particular interest lies in the mechanics of complex hierarchical materials with features across scales. An expert in computational materials science and AI, he pioneered the field of materiomics, and demonstrated broad impacts in the study of mechanical properties of complex materials, including predictive materials design and manufacturing. He received many distinguished  awards, including the Feynman Prize, the ASME Drucker Medal, the J.R. Rice Medal, and many others. Buehler is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).  
  

Bruno Castro, Nature Materials

Bruno Castro earned a Bsc in Biochemistry from Lisbon University (Portugal) where he also completed a PhD in Chemistry, focusing on lipid phase separation and protein sorting in cell membrane model systems. He then moved to ICFO - The Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona (Spain), to conduct research in cell membrane organization of immune cells using single molecule and advance fluorescence microscopies. Castro became a scientific editor at Nature Communications in 2016 and joined Nature Materials in June 2017, where he handles manuscripts in the broad areas of biomaterials and bioengineering, including nanomedicine, drug delivery, bioimaging, tissue engineering, and mechanobiology.
  

Speakers

Jennifer Dionne, Stanford University

Jen Dionne is a sculptor of light at the nanoscale. She develops methods to observe and control molecular processes with light, emphasizing critical challenges in global health and sustainability. As a Professor of Materials Science and of Radiology at Stanford, and a Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, her research has developed culture-free methods to detect pathogens and their antibiotic susceptibility; methods to image and direct photo-chemical reactions with atomic-scale resolution; and materials that enable direct visualization of cellular forces. She is also co-founder of Pumpkinseed – a company dedicated to improving personal and planetary health through protein sequencing. She frequently collaborates with visual and performing artists to convey the beauty of science to the broader public. Her work has been recognized with the Alan T. Waterman Award (the highest US award for scientists under 40), a NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and her work was also featured on Oprah’s list of “50 Things that will make you say ‘Wow’!”. 
   

Peter Fratzl, Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces

Peter Fratzl studies hierarchical structure and mechanical behavior of biological and bioinspired materials, contributing to solving problems in medicine and engineering. He obtained an engineering degree from Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, France, and a doctorate in Physics from University of Vienna, Austria. He is director at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, heading the Department of Biomaterials, and honorary professor at Potsdam University and at Humboldt University Berlin. He also co-directs the interdisciplinary Cluster of Excellence “Matters-of-Activity” that addresses materials between the sciences, humanities and design, as well as the Max Planck Queensland Center for the materials science of extracellular tissues. He is member of several Academies of Science, of the German National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) and the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Photo credit: Sebastian Rost and Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces
   

Lei Jiang, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Lei Jiang is a Professor at the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences (TIPC). He is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, National Academy of Engineering (USA), Australian Academy of Science and Academia Europaea. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Jilin University, and PhD from the University of Tokyo. He worked as a post-doctoral fellow with Akira Fujishima and then as a senior researcher in the Kanagawa Academy of Sciences and Technology. In 1999, he joined Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2015, he and his group moved to TIPC. His scientific interests focus on bio-inspired, smart, multi-scale interfacial materials with superwettability. Jiang has discovered and established the basic principle of the interfacial material systems with superwettability and extended them to successful innovative applications. His work has been followed by more than 1,400 research institutions in 94 countries around the world. He is the most original and influential scientist in the field of material science in China. Due to his contribution to the development of superwettability, he won the TWAS Prize in Chemistry in 2011, the Advanced Science and Technology Award of THE HO LEUNG HO LEE FUNDATION in 2013 and the Outstanding Achievement Award of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2014. In 2016, he won the UNESCO Medals for contributions to the development of nanoscience and nanotechnologies, and the Nikkei Asia Prize. In 2017, he won the Humboldt Research Award in Germany. In 2018, he was awarded the Qiu Shi Outstanding Scientist Award and Nano Research Award. In 2020, he won the ACS Nano Lectureship Award. In 2022, he won Tan Kah Kee Science Award.
   

David Kaplan, Tufts University

David Kaplan is the Stern Family Endowed Professor of Engineering at Tufts University, a Distinguished University Professor, and Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.   His research focus is on biopolymer engineering, tissue engineering, regenerative medicine and cellular agriculture.  He has published over 1,000 peer reviewed papers, is editor-in-chief of ACS Biomaterials Science and Engineering and he serves on many editorial boards and programs for journals and universities.  His lab has been responsible for over 150 patents issued or allowed, and more than a dozen start-up companies.  He has also received a number of awards for his research and teaching and was elected as a Fellow to the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
  

Ali Khademhosseini, Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation

Ali Khademhosseini is the CEO and Founding Director at the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation. Previously, he was a Professor of Bioengineering, Chemical Engineering and Radiology at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA). He joined UCLA as the Levi Knight Chair in November 2017 from Harvard University where he was Professor at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and faculty at the Harvard-MIT’s Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and as well as associate faculty at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. At Harvard University, he directed the Biomaterials Innovation Research Center (BIRC) a leading initiative in making engineered biomedical materials. Khademhosseini has served as an Associate Editor for ACS Nano from 2013 to 2021. He also served as the Research Highlights editor for Lab on a Chip. He is a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), Biomaterials Science and Engineering (FBSE), Materials Research Society (MRS), NANOSMAT Society, and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is the recipient of the Mustafa Prize and is a member of the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering, Royal Society of Canada and Canadian Academy of Engineering, and National Academy of Inventors. He is an author on >680 peer-reviewed journal articles, editorials and review papers, >70 book chapters/edited books and >50 patents/patent applications. He has been cited >98,900 times and has an H-index of 159. He has made seminal contributions to modifying hydrogels and developing novel biomaterial solutions for addressing pressing problems in healthcare. He has founded three companies, Obsidio Medical which was recently acquired by Boston Scientific, Omeat and BioRAE. He received his PhD in bioengineering from MIT (2005), and MASc (2001) and BASc (1999) degrees from University of Toronto both in chemical engineering.
   

Ali Miserez, Nanyang Technological University

Ali Miserez is a Full Professor of Biomimetic and Bioinspired Materials at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), which he joined in 2009, with joint appointments in the School of Materials Science and Engineering and the School of Biological Sciences. He obtained his PhD (2003) from EPFL (Switzerland) in the field of composite and mechanics of materials. From 2004 to 2009, he was a post-doctoral fellow at UC Santa Barbara, where he expanded his research towards biomimetic engineering and biochemistry of extra-cellular tissues. Miserez’s research aims at revealing the molecular, physico-chemical, and structural principles from unique biological materials, and at translating their molecular design into novel biomimetic materials, including for healthcare applications. At NTU, he is currently the founding Director of the “Center for Sustainable Materials”. His interdisciplinary research has been published in over 100 articles in a wide range of journals across the Physical and Life Sciences, including in Science, Nature Materials, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Chemistry, Biomacromolecules, ACS Nano, Acta Biomaterialia, Advanced Materials, J. Biological Chemistry, Polymer Chemistry, etc. He has delivered numerous invited talks, including at Gordon Research Conferences in the field of bioinspired materials, biointerfaces, biomineralization, and intrinsically disordered proteins.
   

Molly Shoichet, University of Toronto

Molly Shoichet is University Professor, a distinction held by less than 2% of the faculty, at the University of Toronto. She served as Ontario’s first Chief Scientist in 2018 where she worked to enhance the culture of science. Shoichet has published over 650 papers, patents and abstracts and has given over 420 lectures worldwide. She currently leads a laboratory of 30 and has graduated 220 researchers. Her research is focused on drug and cell delivery strategies in the central nervous system (brain, spinal cord, retina) and 3D hydrogel culture systems to model cancer. Shoichet co-founded four spin-off companies and is actively engaged in translational research and science outreach. She is the recipient of many prestigious distinctions and the only person to be inducted into all three of Canada’s National Academies of Science of the Royal Society of Canada, Engineering and Health Sciences. In 2018, Shoichet was inducted as an Officer of the Order of Canada and in 2011, she was awarded the Order of Ontario. She was the L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science Laureate for North America in 2015, elected Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2016, won the Killam Prize in Engineering in 2017 and elected to the Royal Society (UK) in 2019. In 2020, Shoichet was awarded the NSERC Herzberg Gold Medal and won the Margolese National Brain Disorders Prize. She received her SB from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1987) and her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in Polymer Science and Engineering (1992). Photo credit: Jenna Wakani.    
    

André R. Studart, ETH Zurich

Subra Suresh, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Subra Suresh is President of the Global Learning Council, a cross-sector innovation platform, established as a Council of the Villars Institute in Switzerland and committed to advancing the use of science and technology to improve the outcomes for learners.  He is also the Vannevar Bush Professor of Engineering Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  He is an Independent Director of the Corporate Boards of HP Inc. (HPQ) and of the Singapore Exchange (SGX). Previously, he was Director of the US National Science Foundation (NSF), a position to which he was nominated by the President of the United States and unanimously confirmed by the US Senate.  He has also served as the President of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and of Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, following successful tenure as Dean of Engineering at MIT and Professor of Engineering at Brown University.  Suresh is an elected member of all three US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He has also been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Inventors, and a foreign member of major science and/or engineering science academies in China, France, Germany, India, Spain, and Sweden. Suresh has authored three books, over 300 research articles and 30 patent applications. Suresh has been awarded 20 honorary doctorates from prestigious academic institutions around the world.  His many honors include: the Padma Shri, one of the highest civilian awards, from the President of India on Republic Day; honorary fellowship of St. Hugh’s College at Oxford University in the UK; the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia; the FEMS Medal from the Federation of European Materials Societies; the IRI Medal from the Industrial Research Interchange; and the ASME Medal, the Timoshenko Medal and the Nadai Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. 
  

Silvia Vignolini, University of Cambridge

Silvia Vignolini is the Director of the Sustainable and Bio-inspired Materials Department at the Max Plank for Colloid and Interfaces in Potsdam and a University Professor in Sustainability and Bio-inspired materials at the Chemistry Department in Cambridge. She studied Physics at the University of Florence, Italy. In 2009, she was awarded a PhD in Solid State Physics at the European Laboratory for non-Linear Spectroscopy and the Physics Department at the University of Florence. In 2010, she moved to Cambridge as a post-doctoral research associate working in the Cavendish Laboratory and the Plant Science Department. Her research interest lies at the interface of chemistry, soft-matter physics, optics, and biology. In particular, her research focuses on the study of how biopolymers are assembled into complex architectures within living organisms and how they can be exploited to fabricate a sustainable functional materials.