Jennifer Cochran, Ph.D., is the Shriram Chair of Bioengineering and is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering, and, by courtesy, of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. Formerly the Director of Graduate Studies in Bioengineering, she currently serves as the Director of the Stanford-NIH Biotechnology Predoctoral Training Grant, and Co-Director of the Stanford-NIST Graduate Training Program. Her research group uses interdisciplinary approaches in chemistry, engineering, and biophysics to study complex biological systems and to develop new technologies for basic science and biomedical applications.
Dr. Cochran's research is driven by the philosophy that in order to effectively control physiological processes, it is necessary to understand the molecular mechanisms that drive these processes. Her lab is interested in elucidating molecular details of receptor-mediated cell signaling events, as well as developing protein and peptide-based tools that will allow manipulation of cellular processes on a molecular level. For biomedical applications, rational design and combinatorial methods are used to create designer protein therapeutics and diagnostic agents for applications such as regenerative medicine and cancer imaging and therapy. Dr. Cochran obtained her Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Biological Engineering. She has received the National Cancer Institute Howard Temin Award, the Martin D. Abeloff Scholar Award from the V Foundation for Cancer Research, an American Cancer Society Research Scholar Award, and a Sidney Kimmel Scholar Award. She was also named the 47th Mallinckrodt Faculty Scholar by the Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. Foundation.
For more information on Dr. Cochran's research, please visit her website: http://cochranlab.net/