Huge shoutout to the following CEL Lab members for graduating this year:
Jack Rogot: Ph.D., Biomedical Engineering
Matthew Pellicore: Ph.D., Biomedical Engineering
Howard Nicholson III: MPhil, Biomedical Engineering
Neeraj Sakhrani: MPhil, Biomedical Engineering
Claire Pinnie: B.S., Biomedical Engineering
Ratna Sharma: B.S., Biomedical Engineering
Congratulations everyone! 🎓
Congratulations to Jack Rogot, CEL's newest PhD, for successfully defending his thesis titled "The Role of the Ligament Sheath in Anterior Cruciate Ligament Maintenance and Repair" on May 16, 2025! We’re all so proud of you and everything you’ve accomplished during this PhD journey. Your hard-work, attention to detail, willingness to always offer a helping hand, and your uplifting spirit have left a lasting mark on the lab. We wish you the best in all your future endeavors and we all know you'll achieve great things!
Way to go, Dr. Rogot!
Ratna Sharma was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship for her proposal titled “Joint-on-a-Chip Model to Elucidate the Interplay of Type 2 Diabetes on Osteoarthritis.” Ratna has been part of CEL since her first year as an undergraduate, and we’re incredibly proud that her four years of dedicated research have culminated in this amazing and well-deserved achievement!
Congratulations, Ratna!
We’re thrilled to welcome Elisa to our CEL family! Elisa is currently pursuing her PhD at ETH Zurich and will be spending six months with us to build upon her thesis work. From January to July, she has been working on developing in vitro models for skeletal muscle pathologies using GelMA hydrogels seeded with chondrocytes. We’re so excited to have you in the lab, Elisa!
Neo Nyoni and Derek Ning joined CEL in Fall 2024 as our newest GRA students! We’re so excited to have you join the team and look forward to your amazing research journey ahead!
Welcome, Neo and Derek!
Emma Baltrusaitis joined CEL as part of Columbia University’s Engineering the Next Generation (ENG) Program. Emma is a rising 12th grader attending Hunter College High School. This summer, Emma spent 6 weeks working on a research project under the mentorship of Dr. Clark Hung and Howard Nicholson III. Her project focused on investigating the effects of bleeding on the ACL and exploring ferroptosis as a mechanism of cell death in the joint space. Her final presentation, titled “Elucidating the Role of Blood Constituents in ACL Injury”, was given at the ENG Symposium on August 15, 2024.
Congratulations Emma! We can wait to see what you accomplish next!
Let's give a big round of applause to Kedar Krishnan for joining CEL this summer!
Kedar Krishnan completes the Columbia University-Amazon Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) Program. As a SURE fellow, Kedar spent 10 weeks conducting research under the guidance of Dr. Clark Hung and graduate student Neeraj Sakhrani. Kedar is a rising senior at Johns Hopkins University, pursuing a double major in Biomedical Engineering and Computer Science. This summer, his research project focused on in vitro models of diabetes and osteoarthritis. His final poster, titled “Development of a Blood-Joint Transwell System to Investigate the Effect of High Blood Glucose Exposure in a Diabetic Osteoarthritis Model”, was presented at the SURE 2023 Summer Symposium on July 31, 2024. Kedar’s project was also accepted for a poster presentation at the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) annual conference in Baltimore, Maryland.
Congratulations, Kedar! Thank you for your hard work this summer and we’re all so proud of you!
Huge shoutout to the following CEL Lab members for graduating this year:
Lianna R. Gangi: Ph.D., Biomedical Engineering
Hagar M. Kenawy: Ph.D., Biomedical Engineering
Inioluwa Ojediran: B.S., Biomedical Engineering
Congratulations everyone! 🎓
Congratulations to Lianna Gangi, CEL's newest PhD, for successfully defending her thesis titled "Toward Understanding Synovium Structure-Function Relationships and Investigating Sex-Based Differences in Cartilage Tissue Engineering" on April 11, 2024! Thank you for all the wonderful memories throughout this research journey (and for also being lab mom 🙂) We wish you the very best in all your future endeavors and we know you'll achieve great things ahead!
We’re so proud of you Dr. Gangi!
Congratulations to our amazing advisor Professor Clark T. Hung on receiving a $38.95 million contract from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to build a living knee replacement from biomaterials and human stem cells, including a patient’s own cells!
The award, part of the ARPA-H’s Novel Innovations for Tissue Regeneration in Osteoarthritis (NITRO) program, will support the development of NOVAJoint, a revolutionary biocompatible, low-cost, patient-specific knee joint replacement. This high-risk project builds upon more than two decades of collaborative musculoskeletal research at Columbia in engineering and medicine, and promises to offer a transformative solution for the more than thirty million people in the U.S. who suffer from osteoarthritis.
The project team is multidisciplinary, with scientific leadership from faculty in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Orthopedic Surgery, and Dental Medicine. The scientific and clinical faculty at Columbia include:
Clark Hung, Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Orthopedic Sciences (in Orthopedic Surgery)
Nadeen Chahine, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering (in Orthopedic Surgery)
Gerard Ateshian, Andrew Walz Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Alice Huang, Associate Professor of Bioengineering (in Orthopedic Surgery)
Treena Arinzeh, Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Chang Lee, Associate Professor of Craniofacial Engineering (in Dental Medicine)
Roshan Shah, Russell A. Hibbs Associate Professor and Director of Complex Reconstruction at Columbia University
Kam Leong, Samuel Y. Sheng Professor of Biomedical Engineering (in Systems Biology)
Helen Lu, Percy K. and Vida L.W. Hudson Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Senior Vice Dean of Faculty Affairs and Advancement
X. Edward Guo, Stanley Dicker Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Professor of Medical Sciences (in Medicine)
José McFaline-Figueroa, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Samuel Sia, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Vice Provost for the Fourth Purpose and Strategic Impact
Steve Thomopoulos, Robert E. Carroll and Jane Chace Carroll Laboratories Professor of Biomechanics (in Orthopaedic Surgery and Biomedical Engineering)
Elan Goldwaser, Assistant Professor of Sports Medicine (in the Center for Family and Community Medicine, in Medicine and Orthopedic Surgery) at CUIMC
Mildred Embree, Dr. Edwin S. Robinson Associate Professor of Dental Medicine
Joanna Smeeton, H.K. Corning Assistant Professor Rehabilitation and Regenerative Medicine Research (in Rehabilitation and Regenerative Medicine) (in Genetics and Development)
A huge round of applause for Hagar who successfully defended her thesis titled “Inflammatory-Based Therapies Driven by Intervertebral Disc Injury Responses” on November 20, 2023! Years of late nights, everlasting friendships, endless memories, and even caffeine-fueled breakthroughs have culminated in this incredible achievement! While we wish you can stay here forever, we are all so proud and happy for your next chapter. Best of luck at UPenn and we all know you will continue to accomplish great things!
Congratulations, Dr. Kenawy!
Steven Robles Blasini completes the Columbia University-Amazon Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) Program. As a SURE fellow, Steven completed 10 weeks of research under the advisement of Dr. Clark Hung and graduate student Matthew Pellicore.
Steven joined CEL from the University of Florida. He is a rising senior majoring in Biomedical Engineering with a minor in Mass Communication. This summer, Steven’s project involved developing hydrogels from decellularized synovium and evaluating it’s effect on cell bevahior as a substrate and media supplement. His final poster, titled “Evaluating the Utility of Hydrogels and Solubilized Matrix Proteins Derived from Decellularized Synovial Membranes”, was presented at the SURE 2023 Summer Symposium on August 2, 2023. Steven’s project was awarded “Best Presentation” for Poster Session A.
SURE is an initiative that began in 2021 with generous support from Amazon. The program aims to provide a unique summer research experience for a cohort of students from historically underrepresented backgrounds in STEM. In addition to the completion of a research project, fellows attended programming, lectures, and workshops focused on career, professional, and research skills development. The summer 2023 cohort included 41 fellows.
Congratulations, Steven! Thank you for your hard work this summer!
