Jennifer Weiser

Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering

Professor Jennifer Weiser joined the Chemical Engineering Department of Cooper Union in September 2017. Her background is in drug delivery, wound healing, and developing polymeric biomaterials for medical applications.

After receiving her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2006, Professor Weiser earned her M.S. in 2010 and her Ph.D. in 2012 in Biomedical Engineering from Cornell University. At Cornell, she bridged her Chemical Engineering background with her experience working as an organic chemist in the Exploratory Medicinal Chemistry Department at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals to create polymeric biomaterials for long-term controlled release and wound healing. Professor Weiser also took part in the inaugural year of Cornell University’s NSF GK-12 program, partnering with a local high school to teach STEM classes as “scientist-in-residence.”

Professor Weiser then joined the startup iFyber through a National Institutes of Health (NIH) STTR grant to explore proprietary polymeric materials developed in her graduate lab. There she built a lab and started the process of scale-up and in vivo testing for applications in post-surgical complications and hemostasis.

In 2014, Professor Weiser began a NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA postdoctoral training fellowship in the Biomedical Engineering Department of Yale University to study electrospinning polymer scaffolds for wound healing applications. This work led to a collaboration with the Department of Otolaryngology in the Yale School of Medicine, helping to develop a device for post-surgical complications following total laryngectomy. From 2017-2018, she was appointed a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Surgery at the Yale School of Medicine.

Since joining the faculty of The Cooper Union, Professor Weiser has had research collaborations with several medically oriented departments in NYC. Past projects include work with the Department of Cardiology at the Columbia University Medical Center at Columbia University, where she was appointed an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medical Sciences (In Medicine) from 2018-2019, and the Department of Neural Science at NYU. Currently, Professor Weiser has collaborative research projects with the Department of Orthopaedics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Montefiore.

Professor Weiser is a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, American Society of Engineering Education, and Orthopaedic Research Society. Previously, she has been an Adjunct Professor at Pace University in NYC teaching General Chemistry and Organic Chemistry. She is originally from Westchester, NY and currently resides in Manhattan.

See Professor Weiser’s faculty page here.

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