Xinyan Tracy Cui

Dr. Tracy Cui is William Kepler Whiteford Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Cui is the Director of the Neural Tissue/Electrode Interface and Neural Tissue Engineering Lab. She is also the Neural Engineering Track Coordinator for the Department of Bioengineering Graduate Committee and serves on the Leadership Team of the Center for Medical Innovation. Prior to Pitt, she was a Research Scientist at Unilever Research US in Edgewater, New Jersey.

Dr. Cui earned her BE in Polymer Materials and Chemical Engineering, and her MS in Biophysics from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. She went on to earn her PhD in Macromolecular Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In Dr. Cui’s laboratory, the primary research focus is on the interactions between neural tissue and smart biomaterials. Research areas include the neural electrode-tissue interface, neural tissue engineering, drug delivery, and biosensors. Dr. Cui holds two granted and five filed U.S. patents and has over 70 publications with over 4900 citations and H index of 35. For her research, Dr. Cui has won numerous awards including 2013 Carnegie Science Emerging Female Scientist Award, 2009 and 2011 Pitt Innovator Award, 2008 National Science Foundation Career Award and 2005 Wallace Coulter Foundation Translational Early Career Award. She serves as a grant agency reviewer for the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, Science Foundation of Ireland and the American Institute of Biological Sciences, as well as the Associate Editor of the Journal of Materials Chemistry B. She has been elected as the Fellow of American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering Class 2016, and Royal Society of Chemistry Fellow in 2017.