Catherine M. Klapperich, Ph.D.
Dr. Catherine Klapperich is Professor of Biomedical Engineering. She is the Scientific Director of the DAMP Lab at BU.
Professor Klapperich holds appointments in the Division of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. In 2014, she was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, in 2018 a Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society, and a fellow of the AAAS in 2020. She was the Dorf-Ebner Distinguished Faculty Fellow from 2014-2019. In 2020 she won the Department of Biomedical Engineering Teaching Award, and she won the College of Engineering Teaching Award in 2021. Also in 2021, she won a special College of Engineering Award for Societal Engineering for her work building and running the Boston University Clinical Testing Lab during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr. Klapperich earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in 2000 from the University of California, Berkeley advised by Drs. Lisa Pruitt and Kyriakos Komvopoulos; her S.M. in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University; and her B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Northwestern University. Before coming to Boston, Dr. Klapperich was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory under Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi, and was a Senior Research Scientist at Aclara Biosciences in Mountain View, CA.
Dr. Klapperich’s research is focused on engineering female reproductive tissue models and on engineering medical devices for use in low resource settings and at the point of care. These include the early diagnosis and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, continuous physiological monitoring of hormones and endocrine disrupting chemicals, and development of microfluidic and high throughput cell and organoid culture.
She is building a biobank of human female reproductive tissues and cells to expand the ability of scientists to study new treatments and understudied pathologies.Â
To contact Dr. Klapperich for media appearances and to read her popular writing, please visit www.cathieklapperich.com.