We are excited to welcome Dr. Walter Lee Murfee to the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering. Murfee will join the department as an associate professor this fall.

Murfee earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Skalak. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Microcirculatory Laboratory with Dr. Geert Schmid-Schönbein in the department of bioengineering at the University of California – San Diego.

Murfee’s research is focused on making scientific discoveries and developing new bioengineering approaches for connecting tissue level function to integrated cellular dynamics. Specifically, his laboratory applies in vivo, in vitro, and computational approaches to investigate the vascular patterning and the functional relationships between angiogenesis and other processes, such as lymphangiogenesis and neurogenesis.

Before joining UF, he was an associate professor in the department of biomedical engineering at Tulane University and a member of the Tulane Center for Aging, the Tulane Hypertension and Renal Center of Excellence and the Tulane Center for Stem Cell Research and Regenerative Medicine. Murfee’s work at Tulane University has provided valuable insight for the engineering of functional vascularized tissues and for understanding vascular dysfunction associated with pathological conditions, including hypertension, aging and tumor growth. His contributions to microvascular research include the identification of new cell phenotypes involved in capillary sprouting, the discovery of connections between blood and lymphatic vessels and the development of a novel tissue culture model that mimics the complexity of real, intact microvascular networks for pre-clinical therapy testing.

In recognition of Murfee’s work, he has received the Award for Excellence in Lymphatic Research and the Travel Award for Outstanding Young Investigators from the Microcirculatory Society. He also has received his department’s Teacher of the Year Award three times.

Welcome, Dr. Murfee!