Professor Justin Cooper-White is the Head of the School of Chemical Engineering at The University of Queensland (UQ) and Professor of Bioengineering in the UQ School of Chemical Engineering.

He is Senior Group Leader in the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (UQ), Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility - Queensland Node (ANFF-Q), Co-Director of the UQ Centre in Stem Cell Ageing and Regenerative Engineering (UQ-StemCARE), Chief Scientific Officer of Scaled Biolabs Inc., a lab-on-a chip start-up based in San Francisco, and Editor-in-Chief of APL Bioengineering, published by American Institute of Physics Publishing (New York).

Professor Cooper-White has over 200 journal papers, published in high impact journals in the field of Bioengineering (including ACS Nano, Science Advances, Nature Communications, Nature Protocols, Nature Microbiol., Biomaterials, Lab on a Chip, Cell Stem Cell, Stem Cells Trans. Med., Integrative Biology and APL Bioengineering). He has produced six Worldwide patent families that have reached National Phase Entry in USA, Europe, and Australia in the areas of formulation design for agriproducts, microbioreactor arrays and tissue engineering scaffolds.

He has received numerous awards, including most recently CSIRO OCE Science Leader Fellowship (2013-2018), the AON Insurance and Life Sciences Queensland Regenerative Medicine Award (2015) and the NHMRC Marshall and Warren Award for Research Excellence (2015). His research is focused on understanding the role of mechano-sensing and mechano-transduction in stem cell commitment and tissue genesis, and applying this understanding to developing engineered solutions to replace or repair damaged or diseased tissues. Most recently, he has turned his attention to understanding how the mechanics of our organs and tissues change as we age and the critical roles that stem cells and their niches play in this systemic loss of function.

Researcher biography

Professor Justin Cooper-White is a global leader in using engineering to solve problems in biology. In addition to holding the position of Head of School and Professor of Bioengineering in the School of Chemical Engineering, he is Affiliate Professor in the AIBN, Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility-Queensland Node, Research Director of the Herston Biofabrication Institute (a partnership between UQ and MNHHS) and co-Director of the Australian Organoid Facility at UQ. Professor Cooper-White is a past President of both the Australasian Society for Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering and the Australian Society of Rheology and held the position of CSIRO Office of the Chief Executive (OCE) Science Leader. He has previously held a Visiting Professor Fellowships at ETH Zurich (2007) and Politecnico di Milano (2012-2013). Professor Cooper-White is the Australian representative and Past President of the Asian Biomaterials Federation; an elected Fellow of and Australian representative on the International Union of Societies for Biomaterials Science and Engineering (IUSBE), and an elected Fellow and past vice President of the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Cooper-White has many past and currently active international collaborations with world leading research groups at MIT (US); Stanford (USA); ETH (Switzerland); EPFL (Switzerland); SNU (Korea); University Of Grenoble (France); Politecnico di Milano (Italy); UCL (UK); and the Max Planck Institute (Germany). He has performed contract research and consultancy work for many multinational companies, including Unilever in the UK; Nestle International, Switzerland; Rhodia, US; Inion, Finland, Syngenta, UK; and NuFarm, AU since 2001.

He is the Editor-in-Chief of APL Bioengineering (American Institute of Physics Publishing); serves or has served on the editorial boards of Rheological Acta, Soft Materials, Biomicrofluidics and the Open Biomedical Engineering Journal; and is a reviewer of major international journals, including Nature Materials, Nature Methods, Advanced Materials, Lab on a Chip, Stem Cells, Stem Cells and Development, Biomacromolecules, Tissue Engineering, Langmuir, Biomaterials and Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics.