Amir Sheikhi is an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and, by courtesy, Biomedical Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. Before joining Penn State in August 2019, Amir was a post-doctoral fellow in Bioengineering, training in the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) under the supervision of Professor Ali Khademhosseini. Prior to moving to UCLA, Amir worked with Professor Khademhosseini at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Division of Engineering in Medicine, and Harvard Medical School. Amir earned his PhD in Chemical Engineering at McGill University and continued to complete two years of post-doctoral research on colloids (with Professor Theo van de Ven) and macromolecules (with Professor Ashok Kakkar) in the Department of Chemistry, McGill University. There, he invented the first threshold scale inhibitor based on “hairy” nanocelluloses. In the Khademhosseini Laboratory, Amir focused on the design, synthesis, and characterization of next-generation precision biomaterials for minimally invasive therapeutics. Amir’s interests revolve around the development of affordable technologies based on naturally abundant materials with bench-to-bedside potential. In his free time, Amir enjoys reading about the history of science, swimming laps, and holding popcorn-movie nights!
Amir’s research has been featured in more than 55 publications, 25 seminars, and 8 reports of invention/patent applications with recognition by over 20 news media outlets, including ScienceDaily, EurekAlert! (American Association for the Advancement of Science, AAAS), Phys.org, and eScience News.