Xi (Charlie) Ren, PhD

Dr. Xi (Charlie) Ren is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.  Dr. Ren received his BS (2005) and PhD (2011) from Peking University, Beijing, China.  Dr. Ren participated in a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School during 2012-2016, and served as an Instructor there during 2016-2017. Professor Ren’s lab is working at the interface of biomaterial and stem cell engineering, with the goal of providing regenerative therapeutic solutions to repair or replace damaged tissues and organs. The extracellular matrix (ECM) is an essential niche component that maintains tissue homeostasis and drives tissue regeneration upon injury. The Ren lab is developing biologically selective and chemoselective approaches enabling ECM modulation and functionalization to boost injury repair in vivo and whole-organ bioengineering in vitro. In parallel, they are working to decipher inter-organ and intra-organ endothelial heterogeneity, and thereby to engineer organ-specific vasculature. One of their main model systems is the lung. Dr. Ren is a member of American Thoracic Society. He serves as a reviewer for several journals, including but not limited to Heart & Lung: The Journal of Acute and Critical Care, Journal of Vascular Surgery, Journal of Biomaterials Applications, Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, International Journal of Nanomedicine, and Journal of Visualized Experiments. View a list of Dr. Ren’s publications here.