Incoming engineering professor Celeste Nelson has been selected by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to receive a Career Award at the Scientific Interface. The grants foster the early career development of researchers with backgrounds in the physical and computational sciences who address biological questions in their work and are dedicated to careers in academic research.

Nelson received the $500,000, five-year award for her work on the regulation of tissue growth and development. She will come to Princeton from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she has been researching mammary gland development and breast cancer. Her approach draws on expertise from cell and developmental biology as well as the engineering disciplines to enable the rigorous analysis and computational prediction of developmental processes.

The author of more than 20 published papers, Nelson received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program in 2004. She earned her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering in 2003 at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine after earning bachelor’s degrees in biology and chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Nelson will join the University faculty in September as an associate professor of chemical engineering.

Faculty

  • Celeste Nelson

Research

  • Bioengineering and Health

Related Department

  • Professor and student work together in lab setting.

    Chemical and Biological Engineering