Cancer researcher Asst. Prof. Joyce Chen of the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) has been honored by the nation’s leading society for students, faculty, researchers, and industry professionals in biomedical engineering.
Chen, a joint appointment with UChicago PME and the Ben May Department for Cancer Research, was named a 2026 Rising Star by the Biomedical Engineering Society’s Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering (CMBE) Special Interest Group. The yearly award recognizes exceptional junior principal investigators.
“Early-career awards provide critical validation and visibility at a formative stage, when investigators are building independent research programs and taking bold, unconventional approaches,” Chen said. “They also help amplify emerging voices and ideas that can shape the future directions of the field.”
Chen called the recognition “deeply meaningful to me.”
“It affirms the interdisciplinary direction of my lab at the interface of molecular engineering, cell biology, and translational science,” Chen said. “It is especially rewarding to see our early-stage original ideas and technical risks recognized by the broader biomedical engineering community.”
As part of the honor, Chen will deliver a podium presentation at the next CMBE conference. Her talk will focus on her lab’s development of optogenetically induced mitochondria-carrying extracellular vesicles (Mito-iEVs) as a platform for spatiotemporally controlled mitochondrial delivery and live-cell mitochondrial analysis.
“This work reflects a highly collaborative team effort across UChicago PME and the Ben May Department for Cancer Research, and it exemplifies how engineering tools can open fundamentally new ways to study and manipulate subcellular biology,” she said. “More broadly, we hope this platform will inspire new strategies for organelle therapeutics, live-cell sequencing and dynamic cellular interrogation.”