Professor Kristopher Alan Kilian

My Expertise

stem cell engineering, tissue engineering, model tumour microenvironments, biomaterials, hydrogels

Biography

Prof Kris Kilian is Director of the Laboratory for Advanced Biomaterials & Matrix Engineering (LAB&ME) with a joint position across the School of Chemistry and the School of Materials Science & Engineering in the Faculty of Science, UNSW Sydney. He is co-Director of the Australian Centre for NanoMedicine (ACN) and a member of the Adult Cancer Program in the Prince of Wales Clinical School. He worked for Merck Research Labs in the Methods Development group from 2000-2004 before travelling to Sydney, Australia to do his PhD at the University of New South Wales. In 2007, Kris joined the laboratory of Milan Mrksich at the University of Chicago as a NIH postdoctoral fellow to investigate new methods for directing the differentiation of stem cells. He was Assistant Professor (2011-2017) and Associate Professor (2017-2018) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and the Department of Bioengineering, before returning to UNSW in 2018 as a Scientia Fellow between the School of Chemistry and the School of Materials Science and Engineering. Kris is a recipient of the Cornforth Medal from the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (2008), the NIH Ruth L. Kirchstein National Research Service Award (2008), a Kavli Fellow of the 19th German-American Frontiers of Science (2014), the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award (2015), a Young Innovator of Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering (2017), the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (2018), the Dean's Award for Research Excellence (2020) and a Eureka Prize finalist for Innovative Use of Technology (2023). His research interests include the design and development of model extracellular matrices and dynamic hydrogels for cell and tissue engineering, and fundamental studies in cell plasticity.

For more information please visit the Laboratory for Advanced Biomaterials and Matrix Engineering

My Research Activities

We are an interdisciplinary research group at UNSW Sydney with a broad goal to design materials that unravel ‘matrix structure-cell function’ relationships. Inspired by biological materials, we integrate nano- and micro- fabrication techniques with synthetic chemistry to mimic the physical and chemical properties of the cell and tissue microenvironment. Our overarching strategy is to:

Develop synthetic model systems to address fundamental questions in cell biology.
Use the output from 1 to design biomaterials that direct a functional outcome for commercial and clinical translation (e.g., cell differentiation and de-differentiation)

All our efforts are centred on the idea that cell state and fate is ruled by inherent cell plasticity and the context in which multivariate signals are presented.

Current projects include: