Department of Biomedical Engineering

The Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) Foundation has selected Jennifer Kang-Mieler, chair and professor in Stevens’ Department of Biomedical Engineering, as one of its 2025 ARVO Foundation Honorees. This is the highest honor bestowed by the ARVO Foundation.

ARVO is the largest and most respected eye and vision research organization in the world with a membership including nearly 12,000 researchers from more than 60 countries. ARVO advances research worldwide into understanding the visual system and preventing, treating and curing ocular disorders.

This honor comes on the heels of Kang-Mieler’s $2.2 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 grant alongside fellow Biomedical Engineering professor Yu Gan to study to combat vision loss in infants. Additionally, Kang-Mieler and her research team are developing ocular drug delivery systems for age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and enhancing imaging methods for early diabetic retinopathy (DR) detection. Both projects are also supported by NIH R01 grants.

“I have been fortunate to work with ARVO for years in various roles, including Board of Trustees and Vice President,” said Kang-Mieler. “I am honored and thrilled to have been selected as one of the 2025 ARVO Foundation Honorees.”

Jennifer Kang-Mieler, professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and assistant professor Yu Gan are both principal investigators of a $2.2 million project funded by the National Institutes of Health that will use innovative methods to study vision disorders in prematurely born infants.

Kang-Mieler and Gan, in collaboration with both Oregon Health & Science University and the University of Illinois-Chicago, will build a diagnostic tool guided by generative artificial intelligence (AI) to try to detect retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), an eye disorder and loss of vision that can quickly progress.

For generative AI to aid in early detection, Kang-Mieler and Gan will build a custom data set using images of ROP cases in animals. There are few human ROP images from which to reference, so Kang-Mieler and Gan will work with Stevens post-doctoral fellows and graduate and undergraduate student teams to collect animal ROP images and process them, extracting the most useful predictive features from the images, then using them to teach an AI model to generate the best-possible synthetic images of human ROP by employing generative AI image-translation techniques.

This new, synthetic image data can then be used to train neural networks that will assist ophthalmologists in spotting ROP or tracking the progression of the disease. NIH’s initial funding for the project will extend through summer 2028.

Jinho Kim, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, has been awarded a grant worth $594K from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop innovative tissue engineering technologies to study and treat various human diseases.

Kim’s work is part of an NIH P41 Center Grant, totaling nearly $6.5 million, awarded to the Tissue Engineering Resource Center, which involves collaboration with multiple investigators from Columbia University and Tufts University.

Kim’s primary goal is to develop the next generation of tissue assessment technologies to probe the key drivers of tissue formation and functionality within the spectrum of injury and disease.

The vision for the Tissue Engineering Resource Center is to build a hub for tissue engineering research, collaboration, training and outreach serving the scientific community, medicine and society. The Center will provide established, junior and aspiring researchers resources to further the field of tissue engineering, with a strong impact on regenerative medicine, modeling and treatment of injury and disease.

Specifically, Kim and his colleagues at the Tissue Engineering Resource Center will integrate advanced technologies, including biosensing, genomics, imaging, computational modeling and machine learning, into their experiments. Their goal is to develop micro-tissue platforms and whole-organ bioreactors for patient-specific modeling of injury and disease progression, as well as treatment strategies.

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Professor and Associate Chair of Graduate Studies in the Department of Biomedical Engineering Xiaojun Yu recently received a $408,500 grant from the National Institutes of Health for his project, “Ionically Conductive Polymeric Biomaterials and Grafts for Nerve Regeneration.” With the University of Connecticut Health Center as prime, the project seeks to develop improved nerve grafts to address large-gap peripheral nerve injuries (PNI).

PNI affects millions of people in the U.S., and PNI with large gaps (generally greater than 5 cm) require surgery in order to be repaired.

Although biological and synthetic grafts are widely used to repair PNI with large gaps, outcomes are variable and imperfect. Grafts made from a person’s own tissue are considered the gold standard treatment but are limited by availability and defect repair size, while synthetic grafts have poor biodegradability, strength, bioactivity and functionality.

Because physical and chemical stimulation can enhance nerve regeneration responses, incorporating these methods could help address some current treatment limitations.

Thus, using a combination of tissue scaffolds made of chitosan and hybrid-engineered nerve allografts (tissue taken from another person’s body), Yu aims to engineer grafts with enhanced large-gap nerve regeneration capabilities that deliver both electrical stimulation and a chemical compound called 4-aminopyridine, which is used to help improve nerve function.