The intersection of engineering and healthcare: A Q&A with Irene de Lazaro

The Northeast Bioengineering Conference (NEBEC), hosted on a rotating basis by member institutions, has a long-standing tradition of bringing together students, researchers, and industry professionals to share cutting-edge advances in biomedical engineering. This year, the eagerly anticipated event was held at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, drawing nearly 500 attendees to Brooklyn to hear keynote speakers, participate in technical sessions, and engage in networking opportunities.

"The event represented the incredible collaborative spirit of bioengineering in the Northeast region," said NYU Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology Juan de Pablo, who is also Executive Dean of NYU Tandon. "Bringing NEBEC here was particularly timely as Tandon pursues an ambitious health engineering agenda and the launch of a new cross-institutional initiative led by renowned chemical engineer Jeffrey Hubbell, with the aim of translating scientific discoveries into pioneering treatments.”

The 2025 edition of NEBEC, which had as its theme "Engineering the Future of Healthcare," was organized in large part by Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering Irene de Lázaro, and we caught up with her to find out more about the conference, her own work, and what she foresees in the coming years.

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Could you start by sharing a bit about your background and your current research focus?

I went to Pharmacy School in my home country (Spain) and later earned my M.Sc. in Drug Delivery at University College London’s School of Pharmacy. I was initially very excited about the nanomedicine field but, by the end of my degree, I also became interested in the topic of tissue regeneration. That was not long after the team of Shinya Yamanaka in Japan discovered a cocktail of four transcription factors that when forcefully expressed in adult cells in culture (for example, a skin cell) can make them behave like an embryonic stem cell again, with its ability to divide and also to re-differentiate again into virtually any cell type of the body. My advisor had recently visited Yamanaka (who later would receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for this discovery) in Japan and came back to London with the idea of trying to reprogram cells directly in vivo (that’s to say, in living tissue). I decided to remain at University College London to study for a Ph.D. in Regenerative Medicine and that became the topic of my dissertation. Fast forward 15 years and what then seemed like a “crazy” idea is now a reality (at least in mice!).

Can you share your recent work in this area?

I now run the NanoBioEngineering for Tissue Reprogramming and Regeneration laboratory here at Tandon, and we’re developing ways to reprogram cells in vivo and ultimately enhance the regeneration of injured or aged tissues. That’s important where heart health is concerned, because when cardiac muscle cells become irreparably damaged, as when someone suffers a heart attack, they don’t grow new cells to replace those that die. Our recent findings also show that cell reprogramming can revert at least some of the cellular changes that take place during aging, so some of my team members are focused on better understanding the relationship between disease and aging and whether reprogramming can help in this context. Last, we’re engineering nanomedicines for diverse applications, since nanoscale carriers can improve the delivery of small molecule drugs and biologicals like nucleic acids, proteins, and peptides by helping them get exactly where they are needed or by protecting them from degradation.

Could you tell us about the recent conference you helped organize?

I was lucky to have had some experience in this area! From an early stage, when I was a Ph.D student and then a junior postdoc, I acted as Chair of two Gordon Research Seminars in Tissue Repair. These are short meetings that take place just before the reputable Gordon Research Conference of the same name, and are aimed at allowing graduate students and postdocs from around the world to share their work in the fields. As a postdoc, I also led the planning of Harvard’s Topics in Bioengineering (TIB) series. This was one of the most gratifying experiences of my career, and it made me rethink how we share science and make connections. Some of my thoughts were covered in a Commentary piece in Nature Reviews Materials. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to switch the seminar from in-person to a virtual format. What initially seemed like a disappointment actually allowed us to gather a much broader audience: at our peak, we reached 1,000 registrations from all around the world.

That said, NEBEC was an enormous undertaking, as we had almost 500 in-person attendees, and I couldn’t have done it without the help of my department chair, Andreas Hielscher; department colleagues like Industry Assistant Professor Michael Hanna; staff members like Senior Administrative Manager Steven Ruiz and Administrative Assistant Clara Petta-Gonzalez; co-sponsors like Northeastern, Carnegie Mellon, NJIT, and Drexel; and the graduate students who stepped up to volunteer. The Marketing and Events teams at Tandon have also been instrumental and have taught me so much about planning for such a big event.

What was a highlight of 2025 NEBEC for you?

Because the conference was open to people at all levels, from undergraduates to senior researchers, there was an incredible level of palpable energy. It was wonderful to see the excitement everyone brought to sharing their work with one another and engaging in cross-disciplinary discussions that could accelerate innovations from bench to bedside. It exceeded our expectations!

It was also very gratifying to see a fellow NYU Tandon faculty member, Nathalie Pinkerton, receive a NEBEC Emerging Investigator Award, recognizing her promising work in developing responsive soft materials for bioapplications ranging from controlled drug delivery, to vaccines to medical imaging.

In general, do you feel optimistic about the future of bioengineering?

After a conference as impactful as this one, it would be hard not to feel optimistic! It really showcased the convergence of fundamental research with translational applications that’s now evident across the region. Whether they’re in a preclinical stage or being actively leveraged for patient care, there are a lot of incredible advances being made.