Professor, Department of Bioengineering
Contact Information
Campus: Prince William (Science and Technology Campus)
Building: Prince William: Institute for Advanced Biomedical Research
Room 1019
Mail Stop: 1A9
Personal Websites
Biography
Caroline Hoemann (BA, UCSD; PhD, MIT) is a full professor of Bioengineering at George Mason University. Before this, she was a professor in the Chemical Engineering Department at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, where she spent 15 years directing a federally-funded research program on the role of inflammation in articular cartilage repair. She also brings five years’ experience as a research director at a Montreal-based biomedical device company where she invented and developed a medical device for articular cartilage repair that achieved regulatory approval for use in over 17 countries, and was eventually acquired by Smith & Nephew.
Professor Hoemann is highly regarded internationally for her work on cartilage and bone tissue engineering and biomaterial-induced blood and innate immune responses. She is the recipient of 2 NIH-Fogarty post-doctoral fellowships, and four career fellowships, is a fellow member of the International Cartilage Repair Society, and serves on the editorial boards of Cartilage and The Open Orthopaedics Journal. She is a co-founder and on the board of directors of ORTHO-RTi, an orthopedic biotech company specializing in implants that repair joint tissues. Her research program focuses on understanding how to use biomaterial-guided immune responses to regenerate bone and cartilage tissues. She has published 68 peer-reviewed papers, 14 book chapters/expert opinion papers, 171 conference abstracts, and 8 patent inventions. Her translational research program aims to bring new treatment options to patients with arthritis.
In addition to strengthening and expanding the department’s research portfolio, Hoemann brings specific teaching expertise in biomaterials, molecular cell biology, and tissue engineering that will enhance and broaden the department’s educational programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Degrees
- PhD, Toxicology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- MS, Applied Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- BA, Chemistry, Biochemistry Concentration, University of California at San Diego
Research Interests
My laboratory is currently developing a novel bioengineered blood clot system as a novel precision medicine tool. We are also working to understand how traumatic knee injury and resulting inflammatory signals alter synovial membrane activity and induce remodeling of the tidemark, a thin layer that occurs at the articular cartilage-calcified cartilage interface.