Stephany Tzeng is a research associate in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and is part of the Translational Tissue Engineering Center (TTEC).

Her current work combines the non-viral gene delivery technology with recent advances in cancer immunotherapy, leveraging the synthetic nanoparticles as a safe and effective method of reprogramming the tumor microenvironment to activate the patient’s own immune system against cancer. She was also awarded a Young Investigator Grant from the American Autoimmune-Related Diseases Association (AARDA) for her work on biodegradable cell mimics that can activate protective elements of the immune system in the case of autoimmune diseases.

She was awarded a Siebel Scholarship in 2014 while finishing her Ph.D. work at Johns Hopkins on non-viral gene delivery nanoparticles for cancer therapy and regenerative medicine, advised by Jordan Green in the Biomaterials and Drug Delivery Lab. She completed a postdoctoral associateship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the use of synthetic biomaterials for vaccine delivery, including work published in PNAS in 2018 and in Science in 2017.