# Ali Khademhosseini

Ali Khademhosseini (Persian: علی خادم‌حسینی, born October 30, 1975) is an Iranian-born Canadian-American engineer. He is the CEO and Director of the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation in Los Angeles which is continuing the legacy of the transplant pioneer Paul Terasaki. Before taking his current role, he spent one year at Amazon Inc. Prior to that he was the Levi Knight chair and professor at the University of California-Los Angeles where he held a multi-departmental professorship in Bioengineering, Radiology, Chemical, and Biomolecular Engineering as well as the Director of Center for Minimally Invasive Therapeutics (C-MIT). From 2005 to 2017, he was a professor at Harvard Medical School, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. He has published ~1000 publications that have been cited over 140,000 times. As of January 2025 he has an H-index of 194. He is also an entrepreneur who has translated his research into products.

## Early life and education

Khademhosseini was born in Tehran, Iran, and grew up in Toronto, Canada. He received his Ph.D. in bioengineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Robert S. Langer (2005), and MASc (2001) and BSc (1999) degrees from the University of Toronto both in chemical engineering.

## Accomplishments

Khademhosseini is a leader in developing ‘personalized’ solutions that utilize micro- and nanoscale technologies to enable a range of therapies for organ failure, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. He also developed electrically conductive, tunable hydrogels by mixing GelMA with nanomaterials, including gold nanoparticles and carbon-based nanomaterials. He has demonstrated the use of GelMA-based materials for tissue engineering and other clinical applications such as sealants and hemostats.
Another area of focus has been on building multi-organ on-a-chip systems with integrated in-line sensors. Such devices are finding use in the next generation of organs on a chip systems. His early work in electrochemical biosensors with regeneration ability and microfluidic physical sensors allowed in-line monitoring of organs-on-a-chip platforms. He was also one of the pioneers of smart patches for chronic wound healing, where both sensing the wound and the rapid drug intervention was conducted using the same device.

## Translational efforts

Khademhosseini is an academic entrepreneur who has started multiple companies to translate the findings of his research into products. He combined silica nanoparticles with gelatin to engineer shear-thinning materials for the embolization of blood vessels in the peripheral vasculature. He then co-founded Obsidio Medical to pursue clinical applications of this breakthrough. The technology was approved by U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and Obsidio Medical was acquired by Boston Scientific in August 2022.
He also founded Omeat Inc., aiming to produce cultivated meat in a scalable and affordable manner. Omeat is a vertically integrated meat company that also produces humane and cost effective fetal bovine serum replacement.

## Awards and honors

Khademhosseini's interdisciplinary research has been recognized over 70 major national and international awards. He is a recipient of the 2011 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) by President Barack Obama, the highest honor given by the US government for early-career investigators. Khademhosseini is a recipient of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Outstanding Undergraduate mentor award. In 2007, he was named a TR35 recipient by the MIT Technology Review magazine as one of the world's top young innovators. In addition, he has received the young investigator awards of the Society for Biomaterials and the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society. He has also received the American Chemical Society's Viktor K. Lamer award, the Unilever award, and has been recognized by major governmental Awards including the NSF Career award and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator award. He has been awarded the Research.com Best Scientist Award and Materials Science in United States Leader Award twice times since 2022.
In 2011, he received the Pioneers of Miniaturization Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry for his contribution to microscale tissue engineering and microfluidics. In 2016, he received the Sr. Scientist Award of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Society-Americas (TERMIS-AM) and in 2017 he received the Clemson Award of the Society for Biomaterials. In 2019, he received the Mustafa Prize, for his work on microfabricated hydrogel for biomedical applications.
In 2024, he received the Biomaterials Global Impact Award which recognizes distinguished research and development in the field of biomaterials. He also received the AIChE Acrivos Professional Progress award for this work on regenerative medicine and biomaterials.
He is a fellow of National Academy of Inventors, the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering, Canadian Academy of Engineering as well as the Royal Society of Canada. He is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), Royal Society of Chemistry, Biomaterials Science and Engineering (FBSE), Materials Research Society (MRS), and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

## Controversy

In December 2024 and January 2025, Elisabeth Bik made a series of comments on PubPeer concerning several publications co-authored by Khademhosseini (from more than 1000 papers and thousands of co-authors). These comments raised issues such as duplicated areas in scientific figures in a few articles published in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2024 as well as the same image being used in different articles but to depict different experiments. As of January 2025, the authors have issued a rebuttal with corrected figures for nearly all of these concerns. The authors identified that, in one case, an image had edits made by the journal to edit the corner labels. In cases where the original data could not be retrieved the experiments were performed again to ensure the accuracy of the conclusions. In January 2025, Sholto David, raised concerns about scientific figures with duplicated areas in an article published in 2022. In response, the authors showed that the duplicated areas, present on the early draft that was in PubMed Central version, was not present in the published version of the article.