Dr. Charlie Ren

Biography

Charlie Ren trained as a developmental biologist focusing on vascular hematopoietic systems during graduate study. After joining the Laboratory for Organ Engineering and Regeneration at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in 2012, he became an Instructor in Surgery at Harvard Medical School in 2016. During this time, he developed systematic strategies for engineering functional vasculature based on decellularized organ scaffolds. He joined the faculty of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in 2017. His research involves the Ren Lab, which works on the interface between biomaterials and stem cell engineering, providing regenerative therapeutic solutions to repair and replace damaged tissues and organs. The extracellular matrix is an essential niche component that maintains tissue homeostasis and drives tissue regeneration following injury. Charlie is also developing biologically selective chemoselective approaches to enable extracellular matrix modulation and functionalization to enhance injury repair in vivo, particularly within whole-organ bioengineering and in vitro settings. Additionally, he is working to decipher inter-organ and intra-organ endothelial heterogeneity to engineer organ-specific vasculature, focusing on the lung as the primary model system.

Research Interests

Experience

Awards