Dr. Green is a Synthetic Biologist with a diverse academic journey. He earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Hampton University in 2011. With accolades, including the UNCF Merck Science Fellowship and Ronald McNair Fellowship, he pursued doctoral studies in Bioengineering at the University of California, Riverside. There, he was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and focused on engineered nucleic acid-based nanostructures, coupling mechanical features with synthetic transcriptional oscillators. Completing his doctorate in 2017, he joined Caltech as a Post-doctoral Fellow, concentrating on engineering population controllers within synthetic E. coli-based communities. In the Fall of 2021, Dr. Green joined Purdue University's Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering. His research centers on designing and building biological controllers as therapeutic agents for host-microbiome modulation, driven by his passion for addressing chronic inflammation and associated diseases.  

Dr. Eden Tanner completed her undergraduate degree with Honors in Advanced Science as a Chemistry major at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She earned her doctorate in Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof Richard Compton, with a thesis titled “Nanoelectrochemistry in Room Temperature Ionic Liquids”. Her love of ionic liquids brought her to Harvard University as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working with Samir Mitragotri. As of August 2020, Dr. Tanner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Mississippi. The Tanner Lab works at the interface of Chemistry and Bioengineering to solve outstanding biomedical challenges, with a particular focus on the use of ionic liquids in nanoparticle drug delivery.  

Dr. Brittany Givens is an Assistant Professor in Chemical Engineering at the University of Kentucky. She received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh in 2014, where she researched the nanotoxicity of catalytic nanoparticles with Dr. Götz Veser and Dr. Ipsita Banerjee. She received her M.S. and Ph.D in Chemical Engineering from the University of Iowa, where her work focused on protein corona formation under advisement by Dr. Vicki Grassian and enhancing drug and gene delivery with polymeric materials under advisement by Dr. Aliasger Salem. She completed a T32 Fellowship in Cancer Biology at the Markey Cancer Center with Dr. Kathleen O’Connor at the University of Kentucky before beginning her faculty position in 2020. She is deeply invested in using Chemical Engineering to solve healthcare challenges, particularly those that disparately affect biological females and those identifying as female. 

Daniel is an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Vanderbilt Brain Institute. His research group develops state-of-the-art brain-computer interfaces and studies the neural computations underlying neuroprosthetic control. Daniel attended university in his hometown of San Angelo, Texas and graduated from Angelo State University in 2013 with a BS in Physics. He then attended Rice University and earned a PhD in Applied Physics in 2019. His graduate work was with Professor Jacob T. Robinson in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he developed micro- and nano-scale tools for monitoring electrophysiology and behavior in millimeter-sized animals. For his postdoctoral training, Daniel worked with Professors Krishna Jayant and Scott Pluta at Purdue University in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Biological Sciences. While there, he focused on leveraging flexible, transparent neural interfaces combined with multiphoton imaging to study the circuit mechanisms underlying cortical traveling waves. His work has shed light on how traveling waves modulate translaminar cortical circuits during sensory processing. Daniel’s work has been recognized by several institutions, including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Burroughs Welcome Fund, and National Science Foundation. 

Dr. Xiaowei Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Surgery at Washington University in St. Louis. He earned his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from Clemson University in 2012. Following his doctoral studies, Dr. Li pursued postdoctoral training at the Translational Tissue Engineering Center at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he also served as an Assistant Research Scientist. Dr. Li was recruited to the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in 2021. Dr. Li’s research focuses on the development of biomaterials to create permissive microenvironments that enhance the efficacy of stem cell therapies for the regeneration of injured or diseased tissues. His laboratory also explores innovative biomaterial platforms to modulate endogenous cell behavior and promote functional tissue regeneration. Dr. Li has been recognized with numerous awards and honors, including the AHA Predoctoral Fellowship, the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund Postdoctoral Fellowship, the AHA Career Development Award, the DoD TBIPH Idea Development Award, the DoD PRMRP Discovery Award, and an NIH R01 grant. 

Dr. Jonathan Brunger is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University. His research program focuses on two goals: (1) to produce strategies to render cells capable of reliably and robustly restoring organ/tissue function and (2) to develop high fidelity models of human tissues as a source for investigating developmental and degenerative disorders. His work combines principles from synthetic biology, stem cell technology, genome/epigenome editing and biomaterial design to regulate diverse cellular behaviors for regenerative engineering, with a focus on developing therapies for and models of neurodegeneration and musculoskeletal diseases.

Dr. Olga Liaudanskaya is an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Liaudanskaya completed her undergraduate degree in Genetics from the Belarusian State University. She earned her Master of Science degree in Applied Biology from the National Academy of Sciences in Belarus. At last, she received her doctoral degree in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Trento in Italy. Following her doctoral work, she completed postdoctoral training at Tufts University in collaboration with the Massachusetts General Hospital and Uniformed Services University she developed a complex human 3D in vitro brain injury model and described the contribution of dysfunctional mitochondria to injury-induced neurodegeneration progression. In collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania (neurosurgery department), she developed brain transplants for large-size brain injuries and described the detrimental effect of neuroinflammation on transplant survival.  

Dr. Briana Simms is a synthetic polymer chemist who specializes in the design, synthesis, and characterization of novel biomaterials with the goal of addressing challenges related to public health. Currently, she is focused on the development of soft biomaterials such as lipid nanoparticles and hydrogels for applications in therapeutic delivery and wound healing, respectively.

She is an alumna of Xavier University of Louisiana (c'o 2012-- B.S. Biochemistry) and the University of Mississippi (c'o 2016-- Ph.D. in Chemistry). She conducted her post-doctoral training/fellowship at Duke University (2021-2023). She joined the UC community as tenure-track faculty in the Department of Chemistry in the Summer of 2023. She holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.