Great mentors paved Hongjun Wang’s educational journey from his time as an undergraduate through his post-doctoral work and beyond. He continues to maintain many of those career-forming relationships today with holiday cards and LinkedIn. It is only natural, then, for the founding chair of Stevens’ biomedical engineering department to serve as an enthusiastic mentor to his own students as they forge their academic pathways.

During his two decades on the Stevens faculty, Wang has mentored 20 candidates in their successful pursuit of doctorates.

“You want your professorship to mean something, and really, the measure of [that] is their success,” he says of his students. “If I advocate for my students and they become successful in their careers, I am proud of them,” says Wang, who holds doctoral degrees from Nankai University (polymer chemistry and physics) and the University of Twente (biomedical engineering).

Enter Christian Buckley Ph.D. ’24. After completing two degrees at Rutgers University, he arrived at Wang’s lab buoyed by his master’s research in bone and tissue engineering. It seemed a perfect fit, given that one of the aims of Wang’s current work is to recreate blood vessels that can be implanted to support regrowth of human tissue.

After an early course correction, Buckley and Wang homed in on the development of new ways to vascularize large-scale tissue constructs to help cells remain viable. But just one semester after Buckley’s arrival at Stevens, as his research was in its early stages, the global pandemic shut down campus labs. While Buckley could do some research virtually, lack of access to the lab over six to eight months proved extremely challenging.

“Our work isn’t the kind you can do in a virtual environment,” says Wang. “If you don’t spend enough time on the bench, you cannot make much progress.”

As labs and campus reopened on a full-time basis, Buckley and Wang built on their relationship, relating more as colleagues than professor to student. “[We’ve] developed a very, very mutual understanding of one another,” Buckley says. “A very open dialogue.”

“We are like a family,” Wang says of his relationship with his students. “Your Ph.D. professor is your advisor, and you will carry that lifelong and it will never change, just like your parents will always be your parents.”

A relationship that formed in a virtual environment helped the pair get through long days and nights and as Wang noted, helped Buckley push himself to “make the impossible become possible.”

– Charles O’Brien