Title/Position Assistant Professor

Degree Ph.D., UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco, 2013

Contact

djctwo@Princeton.edu
109 Hoyt
Cohen Group

Faculty Assistant

Melissa Nini
609-258-2034
melissa.nini@princeton.edu

Research Areas

Biomechanics and Biomaterials
Control, Robotics and Dynamical Systems
Materials Science

Short Bio

Research in the Cohen lab focuses primarily on bioengineering with applications to biomaterials and tissue engineering. We take the elegant swarming and collective behaviors that allow tissues to heal injuries, grow, and form complex structures and connect them to engineering approaches that enable us to control those behaviors in new ways. One example of this is ‘outside-in’ control of tissues where we are building microfluidic and bioelectric devices to literally herd the migration of hundreds of thousands of cells in a manner analogous to sheep herding. This technology may enable us to better control tissue growth and to accelerate wound healing. On the flip side, we are building cell-mimetic materials and microstructures that can integrate directly into living tissues in order to control them from the 'inside-out’. Our work spans a variety of disciplines and we welcome people from all backgrounds to come join us!

Selected Publications

Cohen DJ, Gloerich M, Nelson WJ. “Epithelial self-healing is recapitulated by a 3D biomimetic E-cadherin junction”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2016)
Cohen DJ, Nelson WJ, Maharbiz MM. "Galvanotactic control of collective cell migration in epithelial monolayers", Nature Materials (2014)
Cohen DJ, Mitra D, Peterson K, Maharbiz MM. "A highly elastic, capacitive strain gauge based on percolating nanotube networks," Nano Letters (2012)
Libby T, Moore TY, Chang-Siu E, Li D, Cohen DJ, Jusufi A, Full RJ.“Tail-assisted pitch control in lizards, robots and dinosaurs,” Nature (2012)
Cohen DJ, Morfino RC, Maharbiz MM, “A Modified Consumer Inkjet for Spatiotemporal Control of GeneExpression,” PLoS ONE 4(9) (2009)