The J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering would like to welcome Dr. Edward Phelps, who has recently accepted an assistant professor position!
Phelps will join the department starting January 1, 2017, focusing his expertise on biomaterials, regenerative medicine and immunoengineering.
Before coming to UF BME, Phelps was a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Life Sciences and the Institute of Bioengineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. His postdoctoral advisors were Dr. Jeffrey Hubbell, professor, Merck Serono Chair in Drug Delivery, Laboratory for Regenerative Medicine; Dr. Melody Swartz, professor, Laboratory of Lymphatic and Cancer Bioengineering; and Steinunn Baekkeskov, visiting professor, Laboratory of Immunopathology and Cell Biology of Autoantigens.
He received his B.S. in biomedical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2006, and Ph.D. in bioengineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2011 under the guidance of Dr. Andrés García, the Neely Endowed Chair and Regents’ Professor in Mechanical Engineering. Phelps’ thesis work focused on engineered bioactive materials for therapeutic angiogenesis and pancreatic islet transplantation for which he received the 2011 Georgia Tech Bioengineering Program Best Ph.D. Thesis Award.
Phelps’ research has been supported by the American Heart Association, the Whitaker International Fellows and Scholars Program and most recently by a Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Advanced Postdoctoral Fellowship.
His research objectives are to develop materials-based strategies to:
- Engineer microenvironments to support the viability and function of beta cells
- Educate the immune system to counter autoimmunity
- Further basic knowledge of islet biology to inform the rational design of next generation therapies
Phelps will collaborate with the UF Diabetes Institute, an international leader in investigating the history, prediction and prevention of Type 1 diabetes. Under the direction of Dr. Mark A. Atkinson, the UF Diabetes Institute serves as the umbrella organization under which diabetes education, research and treatment are coordinated at UF and the academic Health Science Center.
We look forward to Edward joining and contributing to the successes at UF BME!