Mark Mondrinos, PhD

Mark Mondrinos received a B.Sc. degree in Chemical Engineering from the FAMU-FSU college of engineering and a B.Sc. degree in Biochemistry, with minors in Mathematics and Biological Sciences, from Florida State University in 2002. He obtained a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Drexel University in 2011. Dr. Mondrinos received the award for ‘Best Dissertation in the Physical and Life Sciences’ for his PhD studies on the development of vascularized pulmonary organoids in vitro. He then received two years of NIH T32-funded postdoctoral training at Temple University School of Medicine, working on animal models of sepsis and clinical studies on inflammatory lung injury that revealed protein kinase C-delta as a targetable inflammatory kinase for lung protection. Dr. Mondrinos was then a postdoctoral scholar for five years in the Department of Bioengineering and the NSF Center for Engineering Mechanobiology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he developed human organ chips and microphysiological systems for diverse applications in modeling normal physiological processes and diseases. Since joining the Tulane Biomedical Engineering faculty in 2019, Dr. Mondrinos’ lab has endeavored to develop complex organ chip systems for modeling advanced cancer pathophysiology, outer retinal pathophysiology, and diseases of the airways and pulmonary interstitium, among other applications. The Mondrinos lab integrates engineering with preclinical science, for example by using these models for investigation of phytochemicals as anti-cancer agents and the development of biological sex-matched human tissue and organ models to enhance and accelerate discovery and drug screening for myriad diseases involving pathology of the vasculature and interstitium.