Professor Joachim Kohn is the Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University. He has served as Director of the New Jersey Center for Biomaterials since its establishment in 1997. He is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and of the International Union of Societies for Biomaterials Science and Engineering (IUSBSE). He is the principal investigator of several leading federally-funded R&D programs: NIH-funded postdoctoral training program in Tissue Engineering, NSF-funded Partnership for Innovation designed to explore new plant-synthetic hybrid biomaterials, NIH-funded National Resource for Polymeric Biomaterials (RESBIO), and the DoD-funded Center for Military Biomaterials Research (CeMBR). As one of two principal investigators of the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM), he guides the efforts of more than one hundred scientists and clinicians located in 15 institutions across the nation.
Professor Kohn's research interests focus on the development of new biomaterials. He pioneered the use of combinatorial and computational methods for the optimization of biomaterials for specific medical applications. He is mostly known for his seminal work on "pseudo-poly(amino acid)s"- a new class of polymers that combine the non-toxicity of individual amino acids with the strength and process ability of high-quality engineering plastics. Medical devices using these materials have been implanted in more than 20,000 patients.
Read the 2013 interview with Dr. Kohn that appears in the Controlled Release Society's newsletter, vol 30.
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