Karen Christman

Assistant Professor, Bioengineering

Regenerative medicine, tissue engineering, polymer chemistry and bio-nanotechnology, multi-scale bioengineering and biomaterial design

Dr. Christman’s thesis examined in situ approaches to myocardial tissue engineering and was the first to demonstrate that injecting a material alone into the infarct can preserve cardiac function following a myocardial infarction. During her post-doctoral studies, she developed novel methods for site-specifically patterning proteins into 2D and 3D structures. She is interested in applying polymer chemistry and nanotechnology techniques to the treatment and regeneration of cardiovascular tissues both in vivo and in vitro.

Capsule Bio:
Karen Christman joined the Bioengineering Department at the Jacobs School in 2007. She received her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University in 2000. She then moved to California for both her graduate and postdoctoral work, receiving her Ph.D. from the University of California San Francisco and Berkeley Joint Bioengineering Graduate Group in 2003 under the direction of Dr. Randall J. Lee at UCSF. She completed her postdoc work in the lab of Dr. Heather D. Maynard at the University of California, Los Angeles in the fields of polymer chemistry and nanotechnology.