Northeast Bioengineering Conference

Tejal A. Desai assumed the role of Sorensen Family Dean of Engineering at Brown University, effective September 1, 2022. An accomplished biomedical engineer and academic leader, Desai’s research spans multiple disciplines including materials engineering, cell biology, tissue engineering, and pharmacological delivery systems to develop new therapeutic interventions for disease. She seeks to design new platforms, enabled by advances in micro and nanotechnology, to overcome existing challenges in therapeutic delivery.

Dr. Daniel A. Heller, PhD, is Head of the Cancer Nanomedicine Laboratory and Member of the Molecular Pharmacology Program in the Sloan Kettering Institute, and Co-Director of The Pat and Ian Cook Doctoral Program in Cancer Engineering at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He is also Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medicine. Dr. Heller obtained his PhD in chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2010, working in the laboratory of Michael Strano. He completed a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in the laboratory of Robert Langer at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT in 2012. Dr. Heller established his laboratory at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2012. His research group is known for the development and application of drug delivery technologies and nanoscale probes to address research and clinical problems. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed publications, is an inventor on over 20 pending or issued patents, and he established several active startup companies to advance these technologies to industry practice or clinical trials. Dr. Heller’s laboratory has pioneered several areas, including: the identification of P-selectin as a nanotherapeutic target for drug delivery to cancers including brain tumors, drug delivery technologies for the targeting of experimental therapeutics to the kidneys, carbon nanotube-based sensors for diagnostic implants and drug discovery, a liquid biopsy molecular perception diagnostic platform, nanochemical biology tools for the investigation of autophagy and lipid dysregulation in vivo, and data analytics for the development of nanomedicines. He is a 2012 recipient of the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award, a 2015 Kavli Fellow, a 2017 recipient of the Pershing Square Sohn Prize for Young Investigators in Cancer Research, a 2018 American Cancer Society Research Scholar, a 2018 recipient of the CRS Nanomedicine and Nanoscale Drug Delivery Focus Group Junior Faculty Award, a 2018 NSF CAREER Awardee, a 2020 awardee of the Weill Cornell Graduate School Pharmacology Teaching and Mentoring Award, a 2021 American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) Fellow, a 2023 awardee of the UM Ventures Life Science Invention of the Year, and a 2024 University of Illinois College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Young Alumni Awardee.