Alumni Spotlight: Jennifer Weiser, Ph.D. 2013

Jennifer Weiser earned her B.S. in chemical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (‘06) and her M.S. (’10) and Ph.D. (’13) in biomedical engineering from Cornell under the mentorship of Dr. David Putnam. In the Putnam Lab, Jennifer leveraged her background in chemical engineering, with her previous experience as an exploratory medicinal chemist for Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, to create polymeric biomaterials for long-term controlled release and wound healing. Weiser also took part in the inaugural year of Cornell’s NSF GK-12 program, where she partnered with a high school biology teacher in Elmira, NY.

Post-graduation, Weiser and Putnam worked together again for a year, joining the startup company iFyber with a NIH STTR grant to explore one of their polymeric materials for in vivo testing. In 2014, she began a NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA postdoctoral training fellowship under W. Mark Saltzman in the BME department at Yale University, where she worked on electrospinning polymer scaffolds for wound healing applications. She also collaborated with the Department of Otolaryngology in the Yale School of Medicine and helped to develop a device for the prevention of pharyngocutaneous fistula. Weiser was appointed a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Surgery there to continue these studies.

In September 2017, Weiser began as a tenure-track assistant professor of chemical engineering at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in NYC.