Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic

Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic is a Serbian American biomedical engineer. She is University Professor and The Mikati Foundation Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medical Sciences at Columbia University, where she directs the Laboratory for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering. She is also a faculty in the Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center and in the Center for Human Development at Columbia University, an honorary professor at the Faculty of Technology and Metallurgy at the University of Belgrade, honorary professor at the University of Novi Sad, and an adjunct professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University.

Her group focuses on engineering human tissues for regenerative medicine, stem cell research and modeling of disease. Together with her team she has published over 350 scientific papers, 60 book chapters and three books on tissue engineering. According to Google Scholar, her papers have been cited 34,450 times, and she has an h-index of 107, making her one of the 1360 most highly cited individuals of all times. Vunjak-Novakovic has also given 370 invited lectures across the world and is named as co-inventor on 80 licensed, issued and pending patents. Building on these patents she co-founded three biotech companies: EpiBone, TARA Biosystems, and MatriTek. Additionally, she is a frequent advisor to the federal government on tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

Vunjak received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Belgrade, in Belgrade, Serbia. After her postgraduate study in Germany, she returned as a faculty to the University of Belgrade in its Chemical Engineering Department. She was a Fulbright Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology from 1986 to 1987 and held joint appointments as research scientist at the Whitaker College of Health Sciences and Technology at MIT (1993-1998) and as adjunct professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University (1994-2004). In 1998 she became a full-time principal research scientist with the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology at MIT, where she collaborated, among others, with renowned biomedical engineer Robert S. Langer. In 2005, she accepted a position as full professor with the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University. She is married to Branko Novakovic, an architect, and they have a son Stasha who is practicing pulmonology and critical care in Miami.

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