Penn Engineering Announces Four New Scholarly Chairs

Penn Engineering is pleased to announce the recipients of four Scholarly Chairs: Drs. Jason Burdick, Zachary Ives, Vivek Shenoy and Beth Winkelstein. These are well-deserved honors and we celebrate the privilege of having each of these outstanding scholars among us.


Jason BurdickJason A. Burdick has been named the Robert D. Bent Professor of Bioengineering.

Dr. Burdick is a Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science. He holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Colorado and completed his postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 2005.

Dr. Burdick has received numerous awards for his research, including a National Science Foundation CAREER award, a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, an American Heart Association Established Investigator Award, and the 2018 George H. Heilmeier Faculty Award for Excellence in Research. He has been elected as Fellow of the American Institute for Biomedical Engineering and recently received the Clemson Award for Basic Research through the Society for Biomaterials. He is on the editorial boards of Tissue Engineering, Biofabrication, and the Journal of Biomedical Materials Research A, and is an Associate Editor for ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering.  He has authored over 220 publications and over 10 patents on his research.

Dr. Burdick’s research involves the development of biomaterials for application in the repair of tissues, particularly in the musculoskeletal and cardiovascular fields. His laboratory primarily engineers hydrogels through advances in both molecule design and processing techniques. His work bridges both fundamental studies of material design and material-cell interactions and the translation of biomaterials towards the clinic. To learn more about Dr. Burdick and his research, please visit his faculty profile.

The Robert D. Bent Professorship was established in 1978 by a grant from the Atlantic Richfield Foundation to honor Mr. Bent, an alumnus of chemical engineering who served as a member of the Board of Advisors for the (then) College of Engineering and Applied Science.


Zachary IvesZachary Ives has been named the Adani President’s Distinguished Professor.

Dr. Ives is Professor and Department Chair in the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania.  He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington where he also completed his postdoctoral training. He has been on the faculty of the School of Engineering and Applied Science since 2003.

Dr. Ives is a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award and a Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching among others.  He is a co-author of the textbook Principles of Data Integration, and has received ten-year most-influential paper awards from the International Conference for Data Engineering and the International Semantic Web Conference. He has served as Associate Editor for the VLDB Journal, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) and Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB); and as Program Co-Chair for the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) Conference. He has served on DARPA’s Computer Science Study Panel and Information Science and Technology advisory panel.

Dr. Ives’ research interests include data integration, databases, data analytics, neuroscience data management, and data reproducibility. He is a co-founder of Blackfynn, Inc., which provides cloud-based data integration and analytics capabilities to facilitate life sciences and medical device research. To learn more about Dr. Ives and his research, please visit his faculty profile.

The Adani President’s Distinguished Professorship was established in 2015 by a grant from the Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Limited.


Vivek ShenoyVivek Shenoy has been named the Eduardo D. Glandt President’s Distinguished Professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Dr. Shenoy received his Ph.D. in Physics from The Ohio State University in 1998 and served as a postdoctoral fellow for two years at Brown University before beginning his career at Brown as assistant professor of Engineering in 2000, reaching the rank of full professor in 2010. He joined Penn as a full professor in 2012.

Dr. Shenoy’s numerous honors include a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and a Rosenbaum Fellowship from the Isaac Newton Institute of Mathematical Science at the University of Cambridge. He serves as the director of the NSF Science and Technology Center for Engineering Mechanobiology, which is a consortium of seven participating universities that advances the study of mechanical forces in molecules, cells, and tissues in plants and animals.

Dr. Shenoy’s research focuses on developing theoretical concepts and numerical methods to understand the basic principles that control the behavior of both engineering and biological systems. He has used rigorous analytical methods and multiscale modeling techniques to gain deep physical insights into a myriad of important problems in materials science, mechanics and biology. He has authored over 200 research publications, with papers in Science, Nature, Nature Materials, Nature Chemistry and PNAS and serves on the editorial board of the Biophysical Journal.

To learn more about Dr. Shenoy and his research, please visit his faculty profile.

In 2015, four Eduardo D. Glandt President’s Distinguished Professorships were established by numerous donors to honor Eduardo D. Glandt, Dean Emeritus of the School of Engineering and Applied Science.


Beth Winkelstein

Beth Winkelstein has been named the Eduardo D. Glandt President’s Distinguished Professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Dr. Winkelstein received her bachelor’s degree in Bioengineering from Penn in 1993 and earned a doctoral degree in Biomedical Engineering from Duke in 1999.  She joined Penn’s faculty in 2002 after completing a post-doctoral fellowship in the neuroimmunology of pain in Anesthesiology & Pharmacology at Dartmouth. She is a Professor of Bioengineering and Neurosurgery and has been the Vice Provost for Education at Penn since 2015

Dr. Winkelstein studies the biomechanical mechanisms of painful spine and other joint injuries, and is defining the pathophysiological cellular mechanisms driving chronic pain, mechanotransduction of pain, and potential diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for these disorders. Her group has pioneered several preclinical injury models of pain, including models of ligament and nerve in the neck, as well as temporomandibular pain and sciatica – these are the first injury models with clinically-relevant symptoms.

Dr. Winkelstein is a Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society and the American Society of Mechanical Engineering, and was elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. She was awarded a Whitaker Young Investigator Award, a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Career Award, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ Y.C. Fung Young Investigator Award, and the ASME Mow Medal. In 2018, she was elected to the World Council of Biomechanics.  To learn more about Dr. Winkelstein and her research, please visit her faculty profile.

In 2015, four Eduardo D. Glandt President’s Distinguished Professorships were established by numerous donors to honor Eduardo D. Glandt, Dean Emeritus of the School of Engineering and Applied Science.