Bio
Jagan Padmanabhan, Ph.D. is an Instructor in the Department of Surgery at Stanford University. His research interests lie at the interface of bioengineering and surgery. Jagan works closely with Dr. Geoffrey C. Gurtner, the Inaugural Vice Chairman of Surgery for Innovation at Stanford, to explore the role of mechanoresponsive immune cells in fibrosis, foreign body response, and cancer.
Jagan is a bioengineer by training (M.Eng., Cornell University, 2011; Ph.D., Yale University 2016), He joined Stanford University as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2016-2021) and performed award-winning research developing a novel small animal surgical model that recapitulates human-like foreign body response to biomedical implants. As part of this research, he led a multidisciplinary research effort involving the departments of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Cardiovascular Medicine, Pediatric Surgery, and Neurosurgery at Stanford to create a library of explanted biomedical devices and patient-derived capsule tissue, which he continues to work on as an Instructor. This library will provide an unparalleled resource for the biomedical research community to investigate biomedical implant failure in the future.
Jagan is also passionate about science education and public engagement with science. Apart from mentoring students in the lab, he teaches STEM courses for high school students in collaboration with Stanford Surgery and the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Institutes every summer. He also runs a blog for scientists, seekers, and skeptics at www.sciencers.org.
Quick fact: Four languages and counting.
