People

Thomas Bina is a M.S.-to-Ph.D. track student in the lab. He received his B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Penn State in 2020, joining the lab in spring 2021. He is interested in biomaterial development for tissue repair and regeneration.

Miryam Adelfio is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab who joined in 2024. She received her B.S. from the Università degli Studi di Palermo in 2014, and her M.S. from the Università degli Studi di Milano in 2016. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Lowell in 2021, where she also worked as a postdoctoral fellow until 2024.

Maho Koga is a PhD student in the lab. She received her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Cornell. She joined the lab in 2023 and is interested in biomaterials-based strategies for regenerating the intervertebral disc.

Jessica Liu is a M.S.-to-Ph.D. track student in the lab. She received her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2019. She joined the lab in 2019 and is interested in developing biomaterials for cartilage interface tissue engineering applications.

Helen H. Lu's research focuses on Orthopaedic Interface Tissue Engineering and the formation of complex tissue systems, with the goal of achieving integrative and functional repair of soft tissue injuries.  Additionally, her research group is active in the design of novel biomaterials for orthopedic and dental applications.  Her group has published extensively in biomaterials and tissue engineering, cell-material interactions as well as smart material design. 

Lu is the inventor and co-inventor of more than a dozen patents and applications, and she has served on the editorial board of leading journals of the fields, including Tissue Engineering, Regenerative Engineering, Journal of Biomedical Material Research A, Journal of Orthopaedic Research, and is currently an associated editor for IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.   Her research has been supported by the Whitaker Foundation, the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, the Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation, the New York State Stem Cell Initiative, the National Football League (NFL) Charities, the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health.

Lu’s research has also been recognized with many awards, including the Early Faculty Career Awards in Translational Research (Phase I and Phase II) from the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation and the Young Investigator Award from the Society for Biomaterials.  She was honored with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) at the White House in 2010, and was elected as a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) in 2011. 

Lu received her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and is currently the Professor of Biomedical Engineering and the Director of the Biomaterials and Interface Tissue Engineering Laboratory at Columbia University.  She also received tenure at the Columbia College of Dental Medicine, and serves as a Provost Leadership Fellow at Columbia.  

Collin Schmidt is a PhD student in the lab. He received his B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins in 2022. He joined the lab in 2024 and is interested in biomaterials-based strategies for tissue regeneration.

Candice (Yueh-Ting) Chiu is a Ph.D. student in the lab. She joined the lab in 2019 as a masters' student, and in 2023 as a PhD student.