Bioengineering Podcast: Meet Five New Faculty Members
Bioengineering blog editor Andrew Mathis has been interview some of the department’s incoming faculty for a podcast series. Get to know Joel Boerckel, Konrad Kording, Lukasz Bugaj, Mike Mitchell, and Alex Hughes, their areas of research and their thoughts on moving to Philadelphia.
Joel Boerckel
Joel Boerckel has a dual appointment in the Department of Bioengineering at Penn and the Perelman School of Medicine’s Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. His research concerns the mechanobiology of development and regeneration. Here, he discusses his career to this point and where he sees the fields of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine heading over the future.
Konrad Kording
Konrad Kording is a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and the Department of Neuroscience in the Perelman School of Medicine. In this episode, Konrad discusses what neuroscience is and isn’t, the “C” word (consciousness), and what it’s like for a native of Germany to live in the United States.
Lukasz Bugaj
Lukasz Bugaj starts as an assistant professor in Bioengineering in January. In this episode, Lukasz and Mathis discuss tennis and crew, Lukasz’s subfield of optogenetics, and life as the child of a statistician.
Mike Mitchell
Mike Mitchell starts as assistant professor of bioengineering at Penn in the Spring 2018 semester. Mitchell discusses his background and education, where cancer research is now and where it’s heading, and just how big the radius is on the cheesesteak zone of impact around Philadelphia.
Alex Hughes
Alex Hughes started in the Department of Bioengineering this fall. He discusses his research 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.