current Members

  • Product

    Cheemeng Tan, Lane Postdoctoral Fellow

    Cheemeng received his B.Eng. degree (first class honors) from National University of Singapore and his M.S. degree in High Performance Computing from Singapore-MIT Alliance. In 2005, he started his doctoral research in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University, where he evolved into a hybrid computational and microbial biologist. His Ph.D. thesis focused on implications of bacterial growth on antibiotic treatment and synthetic gene circuits. He published his research in journals such as Nature Chemical Biology and Biophysical Journal and was awarded the Medtronic Fellowship. His career goal is to improve the rational engineering of synthetic biological systems by tightly integrating both experiments and computational algorithms. At Carnegie Mellon University, he works on the engineering of artificial cells that carry synthetic gene circuits, which have potential impact on drug delivery and bioremediation.
    r Personal website

  • Product

    Lina González, Graduate Student, Mechanical Engineering

    Lina graduated from the Hunter College in New York with a triple major in Physics, Mathematics, and Chemistry. At the Hunter College, she participated in several research programs, including Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, Minority Biomedical Research Support (MBRS), and Minority Undergraduate Research Fellowship (MURF). As a MBRS scholar, she worked in a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) laboratory where she gained research experience in the elucidation of protein structures. As a MURF scholar, she spent two summers at Caltech studying both take-off behavior and wing deformation of fruit fly using Robofly. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She is studying the application of magnetotactic bacteria as biological sensors under the guidance of both Dr. Phil R. LeDuc and Dr. William C. Messner.

  • Product

    YongTae (Tony) Kim, Graduate Student, Mechanical Engineering

    Tony's doctoral research focuses on the integration of microfluidic systems and feedback control theory for lab-on-a-chip applications to biochemistry and developmental biology. Specifically, he created technologies to examine multicellular systems, which are challenging and critical for cancer treatment, embryonic development, and tissue regeneration. Such technologies also have important implications for studies of stem cells, regenerative tissue engineering, and cancer metastasis. Furthermore, since embryonic cells move to specific locations in an embryo to differentiate into specific organs during early developmental stage (e.g. gastrulation), investigation of multicellular dynamics in embryonic development could shed new light on cell motility and enhance the understanding of metastatic migration in cancer cells.
    r Personal website

  • Product

    Mary Beth Wilson, Graduate Student, Biomedical Engineering

    Mary Beth joined the LeDuc Lab in Fall 2009. During her undergraduate years at Carnegie Mellon (2003-2007), she studied material science and biomedical engineering. In addition, she also worked in the field of dental research related to biomineralization and dentin phosphoproteins. Upon graduation, she moved to Birmingham, AL to join the DMD/PhD dentist-scientist training program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). During her 2 years in the training program, she was privileged to take the full medical sciences coursework, which has equipped her with a unique medical perspective. Furthermore, she conducted research with Dr. Mary MacDougall to explore functions of bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) as positive and negative regulators of dental pulp mineralization. After deciding not to pursue clinical dental training, she returned to CMU in Fall 2009 to pursue doctoral training in preparation for a future career in engineering academia.
    r Personal website

  • Product

    John Kang, Graduate Student, Computational Biology

    John received his undergraduate degrees in Biomedical, Electrical, and Computer Engineering from Duke University. John is a PhD candidate in the Joint CMU-Pitt Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology. He is also affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh-Carnegie Mellon University Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) and will follow up his Ph.D. studies by finishing his M.D. degree from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He is interested in the simulation of biomechanical phenomena. He is co-advised by Dr. Russell Schwartz from the Department of Biological Sciences. His extracurricular interests are computer hardware, basketball, and video games.
    In this photo, he is analyzing the response of a Thamnophis brachystoma to human tactile response near my old apartment near the Univ. of Pittsburgh. Photo credit: Matthew Zhang.

  • Product

    Szu-Yuan Chou, Graduate Student, Mechanical Engineering

    Szu-Yuan earned her Bachelor's degree from National Taiwan University with a double major in both Animal Science and Engineering Science. She received the Research Award by the National Science Council of Taiwan government, as well as the Taiwan Minister of Education Fellowship, which is a competitive award with over 1,000 top applicants in Taiwan. After finishing her undergraduate studies, she joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She has presented her findings at numerous conferences including Biophysical Society (BPS) Annual Meeting and Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Annual Meeting, as well as published her work in Biomaterials. In the LeDuc Lab, she focuses on linking mechanics to biochemistry using nano- and micro-technology, control theory approaches, and computational biology.

  • Product

    Robert Steward Jr, Graduate Student, Mechanical Engineering

    Robert is originally from Chicago, IL. He received his Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Clark Atlanta University in the Spring of 2007. Prior to the start of his doctoral research program, he participated in projects supported by the Clark Atlanta University in the Department of Chemistry, Physics, and Engineering, High Performance Polymer and Composites Laboratory, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He began his doctoral research in the fall of 2007 in cellular mechanics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. His current research focuses on how cells dynamically alter their endogenous and exogenous environments in response to coupled modes of mechanical stimulation.

  • Product

    Yukai Zeng, Graduate Student, Mechanical Engineering

    Yukai earned his B.Eng. degree (Honors) in 2008 from the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. From 2008 to 2009, he was employed by the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) as a research officer and worked on predictive computational models of cancer cell mechanics. In 2009, he was awarded the A*STAR Graduate Scholarship to pursue a Ph.D at Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently a Ph.D graduate student co-supervised by Dr. Philip R. LeDuc and Dr. Keng Hwee Chiam from the A*STAR IHPC (Biophysics Department), Singapore. His is interested in computational cancer biomechanics, bio-inspired design for cancer therapy, patho-biotechnology, and the design of engineered systems for biomechanic studies. He engineers fundamentally simple yet elegant systems to study biological problems. He currently works on research projects pertaining to metastatic cancer therapy and cancer cell migration.
    r Personal website

  • Product

    Melis Hazar Haghgoui, Graduate Student, Mechanical Engineering

    Melis received her Bachelor of Science from the Mechanical Engineering Department at Gazi University in Turkey. After graduation, she worked as a full time design and quality engineer at Maxflow Syphonic Drainage Systems. In 2010, she was awarded a scholarship from the Turkish government for her PhD studies (only 4 awards were selected out of >1000 candidates).

the Alumni