Kayla Wolf, PhD

Assistant Professor and Meinig Family Investigator in the Life Sciences

Dr. Kayla Wolf is an assistant professor in biomedical engineering at the Meinig School. Her laboratory is addressing clinical needs in kidney and women’s reproductive health by engineering models of urogenital tract tissues and investigating biophysical forces that direct tissue function.   Previously, she was an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. Jennifer Lewis’s laboratory at Harvard University, where she has developed a stem cell-derived perfusable kidney collecting duct on-chip that can be used for disease modeling or embedded within biomanufactured tissue. She received her Ph.D. in bioengineering from the joint program at University of California, Berkeley – University of California, San Francisco. During her graduate studies, she investigated how tumor cell-matrix interactions influence cell invasion and could therefore be leveraged as therapeutic targets. Dr. Wolf is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Predoctoral Fellow (F31), and Siebel Fellow. Prior to her PhD, she earned a B.S. in chemistry and a B.S. in human biology from Michigan State University.