Rate My Professor Justin Cooper-White

Professor Justin Cooper-White serves as Head of School and Professor of Bioengineering in the School of Chemical Engineering within the University of Queensland's Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology. He holds additional positions including Affiliate Professor at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility-Queensland Node, Research Director of the Herston Biofabrication Institute—a partnership between the University of Queensland and Metro North Hospital and Health Service—and Co-Director of the Australian Organoid Facility. Renowned as a global leader in leveraging engineering to address biological challenges, his research specializes in smart surfaces, hydrogels, scaffolds, and diagnostic microdevices for gene therapy, tissue engineering, stem cell therapy, and early disease detection. Core interests encompass mechanotransduction signalling and its effects on stem cell fate, biomicrodevices and engineered surfaces for cell therapy manufacturing and tissue repair, nanoparticles for rejuvenating aged tissues, and microbioreactor arrays for dynamic cell culture conditions.

Cooper-White's distinguished career includes leadership as Past President of the Australasian Society for Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering and the Australian Society of Rheology, CSIRO Office of the Chief Executive Science Leader, and Visiting Professor Fellowships at ETH Zurich in 2007 and Politecnico di Milano from 2012 to 2013. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of APL Bioengineering and on editorial boards for Rheologica Acta, Soft Materials, Biomicrofluidics, and the Open Biomedical Engineering Journal. His honors comprise election as Fellow of the International Union of Societies for Biomaterials Science and Engineering (Australian representative), the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society, and the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences (past Vice President). He has presented over 20 plenary lectures and 50 keynotes at international conferences. Notable publications include "The impact of extracellular matrix viscoelasticity on cellular behaviour" (Nature Materials, 2020), "Transforming undergraduate laboratory courses with interlinked real-world challenges" (Trends in Biotechnology, 2023), and editorship of "Functional Hydrogels as Biomaterials" (Springer, 2018). He has secured more than $57 million in competitive grants, filed six patents commercialized in Australia, Europe, and the USA, and fosters collaborations with institutions such as MIT, Stanford, ETH Zurich, EPFL, and the Max Planck Institute.