Berk Usta's Biography

Berk Usta, Instructor in Surgery, Massachusetts General Hospital – Harvard Medical School – Shriners Hospitals for Children

O. Berk Usta, PhD, received his BSc from Bogazici University (Istanbul, Turkey) and his PhD in Chemical Engineering from University of Florida (Gainesville, Florida). He joined the Institution in late 2009 as a postdoctoral fellow, and was promoted to Instructor in Surgery at Harvard Medical School in 2013. Dr. Usta’s recent work at the Center for Engineering in Medicine (CEM) lies at the intersection between micro-tissue engineering, biopreservation and computational modeling. He currently leads a team that aims to recapitulate liver physiology on a microfluidic chip as part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiatives of “Tissues/Human-on-a-Chip.” Dr. Usta is also part of the “Supercooling Preservation” team, where he leads the efforts on preservation at the cellular and tissue level, as well as the use of microfabricated platforms and computational models to better elucidate such preservation. These projects are funded by the NIH and Shriners Hospital, among others. He has more than 25 publications spanning Physical Review Letters, Lab on a Chip, ACS Nano, Technology, and Nature Medicine. These have been cited over 450 times and have been featured in major news outlets as well as science blogs. In addition to his institutional roles and in particular, the Center for Engineering in Medicine, Dr. Usta also serves as the Associate Executive Editor of “Technology Journal."