Helen Lu Elected to the National Academy of Inventors
Biomedical engineer honored for inventions in tissue engineering
Credit: John Abbott
Biomedical Engineer Helen H. Lu has just been named a 2023 National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellow. Lu, a leading researcher in regenerative materials and tissue engineering, was elected for her “prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development, and welfare of society.”
Lu and Henry Colecraft, John C. Dalton Professor of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics and professor of Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, join a distinguished class of 162 academic inventors from 118 research universities and governmental and non-profit research institutions around the world. This year’s cohort, which collectively holds more than 4,600 issued U.S. patents, includes 2 Nobel Laureates, 3 National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees, and 22 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
“I share this tremendous honor with my trainees and collaborators, and am grateful for the opportunity to innovate together and solve critical problems for human health,” said Lu, who is the Percy K. and Vida L.W. Hudson Professor of Biomedical Engineering, professor of Dental and Craniofacial Engineering (in Dental Medicine), and senior vice dean of faculty affairs and advancement at Columbia Engineering.
Helen Lu is Percy K. and Vida L.W. Hudson Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Senior Vice Dean of Faculty Affairs and Advancement. Her research focuses on Orthopaedic Interface Tissue Engineering and the formation of complex tissue systems, with the goal of achieving integrative and functional repair of soft tissue injuries.
Lu has had an accomplished career. She is the inventor and co-inventor of more than 40 patents/patent applications on scaffold devices and methods for tissue regeneration, a majority of which originated from her laboratory at Columbia, including 10 issued U.S. patents (7 of which Lu is the lead inventor). Many of these technologies have been licensed and/or led to the formation of several start-ups.
Lu directs the Columbia Biomaterials and Interface Tissue Engineering Laboratory, where she and her students, as well as clinical collaborators have invented cutting-edge medical devices for the treatment of dental caries, periodontal diseases, ACL injuries, articular cartilage degeneration, and tendon repair. Notably these inventions have transformed current approaches to tendon repair and led to the development of a new generation of integrative grafts for soft tissue regeneration. She has published extensively on biomaterials and tissue engineering, cell-material interactions, and smart material design.
I share this tremendous honor with my trainees and collaborators, and am grateful for the opportunity to innovate together and solve critical problems for human health.
She has received numerous prestigious awards for her work. In 2010, she was invited to the White House to receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists & Engineers (PECASE). The next year, she was named an American Institute for Medical & Biological Engineering (AIMBE) Fellow. She has also won the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation Early Faculty Career Award in Translational Research (Phase I and Phase II) and the Young Investigator Award from the Society for Biomaterials. She is also an elected Fellow of Biomaterials Science and Engineering (FBSE). In addition to being a Provost Leadership Fellow, Lu was named a Provost’s Senior Faculty Teaching Scholar at Columbia.
She has also served on the editorial board of leading journals, including Tissue Engineering, Regenerative Engineering, Journal of Biomedical Material Research A, Journal of Orthopaedic Research, and Biofabrication. She has served as associate editor for Science Advancesand is currently a review editor for eLife. Her research has been supported by the Whitaker Foundation, the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, the Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation, the New York State Stem Cell Initiative, the National Football League (NFL) Charities, the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.
Lu joins an eminent group of Columbia Engineering colleagues who have been elected to the NAI: Dimitris Anastassiou and Kam Leong (2013), Shree Nayar and Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic (2014), Richard Osgood, Jr. (2015), Ponisseril Somasundaran (2016), Jingyue Ju (2018), Treena L. Arinzeh (2021), and Shih-Fu Chang, Elizabeth Hillman, and Jeannette Wing (2022).
Lu will be presented with her medal by a senior official of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) at the NAI 13th Annual Meeting on June 18, 2024, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Election as an Academy Fellow is the highest professional distinction awarded solely to inventors. The 2023 class of Fellows represents NAI’s foundational and continuing commitment to diversifying innovation on all levels, with underrepresented inventors comprising 33% of this year’s class. This year’s class also showcases regional diversity with Fellows representing 35 U.S. states and 10 countries, exemplifying the Academy’s belief that great innovators can be found everywhere. The full list of 2023 Fellows can be found here.