Rate My Professor Celeste Nelson

Celeste Nelson is the Wilke Family Professor in Bioengineering and Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering in Princeton University's School of Engineering and Applied Science. She also directs the Program in Engineering Biology and serves as associated faculty in the Department of Molecular Biology. Nelson earned S.B. degrees in chemical engineering and biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998 and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 2003. She conducted postdoctoral research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 2003 to 2007 in Mina J. Bissell's laboratory. Joining Princeton in 2007 as an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering, she advanced to associate professor in 2012 and full professor in 2016, later holding the Pomeroy and Betty Perry Smith Professorship in 2020. Her research centers on mammalian tissue morphogenesis and morphodynamics, employing microfabrication and bioMEMS for tissue engineering to study cell adhesion, mechanics, and branching in lungs and mammary glands. The Tissue Morphodynamics Laboratory examines how mechanical forces like transmural pressure, matrix stiffness, and interstitial fluid pressure interact with biochemical signals to drive development and cancer progression.

Nelson has received the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award (2022), Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholar award (2016), Biomedical Engineering Society Mid-Career Award (2019), David and Lucile Packard Fellowship (2008), and American Institute of Chemical Engineers Allan P. Colburn Award (2011). She is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2016) and Biomedical Engineering Society (2024), and has earned teaching honors including Princeton’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching (2016) and multiple School of Engineering commendations. Key publications encompass “Microfluidic chest cavities reveal that transmural pressure controls the rate of lung development” (Development, 2017), “Localized smooth muscle differentiation is essential for epithelial bifurcation during branching morphogenesis of the mammalian lung” (Developmental Cell, 2015), “Mechanically patterning the embryonic airway epithelium” (PNAS, 2015), and “Dynamic tensile forces drive collective cell migration through three-dimensional extracellular matrices” (Scientific Reports, 2015). She serves on editorial boards for Current Biology and Journal of Cell Science and has guest-edited themed issues on tissue mechanics and morphogenesis. Her scholarship, with over 24,000 citations, has advanced bioengineering and developmental biology.