Rate My Professor Ian Wong

Ian Wong is an Associate Professor of Engineering and, by courtesy, Associate Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Brown University, where he directs a laboratory advancing bioengineering approaches to cancer research. He received his A.B. magna cum laude in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 2003. Wong completed his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University in 2010, focusing on the directed self-assembly of biomolecular materials with Nick Melosh. Subsequently, he undertook postdoctoral training from 2010 to 2013 in BioMEMS and cancer cell migration under Mehmet Toner and Daniel Irimia at the Center for Engineering in Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School. He joined the faculty at Brown University as Assistant Professor of Engineering in July 2013 and was promoted to Associate Professor.

Professor Wong's research centers on engineering miniaturized technologies such as BioMEMS and microfluidic platforms to study cancer cell invasion, phenotypic plasticity, and therapeutic resistance. His interests extend to biomaterials, nanofabrication, 3D printing, directed self-assembly, and polymer physics. He holds affiliations with Brown's Pathobiology Graduate Program, Legorretta Cancer Center, and Data Science Institute. Wong has been honored with the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, Damon Runyon Cancer Research Fellowship, 2015 Nathalie Rutherford Pierrepont Prize for leadership and career advising, 2025 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring in Engineering, and selection for the National Academy of Engineering’s Japan-America Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. Key publications encompass "Anomalous diffusion probes microstructure dynamics of entangled F-actin networks" (Physical Review Letters, 2004), "Collective and individual migration following the epithelial-mesenchymal transition" (Nature Materials, 2014), "Nanotechnology: emerging tools for biology and medicine" (Genes & Development, 2013), "The epithelial-mesenchymal transition and the cytoskeleton in bioengineered systems" (Cell Communication and Signaling, 2021), and "Mechanophenotyping of 3D multicellular clusters using traction force microscopy" (PNAS, 2020). His scholarship has amassed over 3,700 citations, underscoring his impact in bioengineering, materials science, and oncology. Wong also serves as Associate Scientific Advisor for Science Translational Medicine.