Yvon Woappi, Ph.D. studies tissue systems regeneration, a systems bioengineering approach that manipulates cellular heterogeneity in tissue to learn how to enhance its regenerative state. At Columbia, Woappi directs the Synthetic Regeneration and Systems Physiology Laboratory, building microphysiological wound organoids and synthetic gene engineering tools to understand how varied skin cells synchronize their activities to restore organ function. Other areas of interest in his lab focus on the relationship between wound healing and neoplasia, and on building computational frameworks to characterize organ-level responses to wound healing, including immunological factors.
Woappi earned his B.S. in Biology from the University of Pittsburgh and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences as a Grace Jordan McFadden Fellow at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine. He went on to complete his postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital as a Harvard Dermatology Research Training Fellow. Woappi was a recipient of the MIT Rising Star Award and was a grantee of the NIH K99/R00 MOSAIC prize. He joined the faculty at Harvard University in 2021 as an Instructor of Dermatology, then was recruited to Columbia University as an Assistant Professor in the Fall of 2022.
Woappi is an Assistant Professor of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics, and the Endowed Herbert and Florence Irving Assistant Professor of Dermatology in the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. He equally holds a tertiary appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia.