Meet the Team

Andrew Penniman is the business manager for CERES and his roles include operations management, scheduling, billing, and allocation of internal resources needed to provide successful results to the end users, both internal and external.

In my research laboratory at WPI, teams of graduate and undergraduate students collaborate with researchers at WPI and the University of Massachusetts Medical School to design, fabricate, culture and analyze cell-based engineered vascular tissue. I enjoy collaborating with students to explore the role of cells and ECM on tissue organization and material properties in health and disease, and working with undergraduate student teams to apply engineering principles to design and prototype bioreactors that impart mechanical stimuli on engineered vascular tissues to simulate the hemodynamic ...

My research is in the broad, interdisciplinary field of synthetic biology, which applies engineering principles to biology. Within this field, we apply chemical engineering tenets to reprogram the DNA of yeasts, bacteria, and fungi so their metabolism produces interesting molecules. By treating these cells as "chemical factories," we can approach and solve problems in biofuels, biomaterials, and biosensors from a chemical engineer's point of view. Our strengths are in the disciplines of metabolic engineering, protein engineering, and systems biology, which we use to construct novel synthetic ...