Claudia Loebel, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and a Biological Sciences Scholar at the University of Michigan (starting Fall 2021). She obtained her MD (2011) at the Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany and completed her PhD (2016) at ETH Zurich (Switzerland). She then pursued her training as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Jason Burdick at the University of Pennsylvania (2016–2021). Her research involves the development of biomaterial platforms to characterize and uncover the role of nascent microenvironments on cell and tissue function. The applications of this research range from guiding stem/progenitor cell fate through material cues to developing engineered platforms for tissue repair and therapeutic treatment.

Claudia has been awarded the Silver Medal of ETH and postdoctoral fellowships through the Swiss National Science Foundation and IBSA Foundation. She was recently awarded the Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00) through the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at NIH for her work on synthetic lung tissue models to probe mechanisms of alveolar epithelial cell dysfunction.