Jennifer has made pioneering contributions to the programmable assembly of soft functional, structural, and biological materials. These novel architected materials may find potential application in printed electronics, optical and structural metamaterials, soft robotics, and 3D vascularized tissues and organs. Jennifer and her research team have developed new classes of soft functional inks for pen-on-paper electronics, flexible electronics, and 3D antennas. They have also demonstrated a new route for creating shape-morphing architectures, known as biomimetic 4D printing. Finally, they have recently developed a multi material 3D bioprinting method that enables the creation of thick vascularized tissues and 3D organs-on-chip. Her work on microscale 3D printing was highlighted as one of the “10 Breakthrough Technologies” by the MIT Technology Review, while her bioprinting research was named “one of the top 100 science stories” by Discover Magazine.
To underpin these efforts, she leads a large, multidisciplinary research group that brings together fundamental expertise in soft matter, microfluidics, and additive manufacturing. Given her broad range of research, she is active in most of the Wyss Institute Focus Areas: Adaptive Material Technologies, Bioinspired Robotics, Biomimetic Microsystems, Systems Biology, and Programmable Nanomaterials.
Jennifer is the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She earned a Sc.D. in Ceramic Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has received numerous distinctions, including an election to the National Academy of Engineering, the NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow Award, the Brunauer Award from the American Ceramic Society, the Langmuir Lecture Award from the American Chemical Society, and the Materials Research Society Medal. She is a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society, the American Physical Society, the Materials Research Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Inventors. She serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards of Advanced Functional Materials and Soft Matter. She has authored more than 150 papers and thirty patents. She is a co-founder of two companies that are commercializing technology from her lab.