Jennifer Weiser

Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering

About

Jennifer Weiser, Ph.D.

Office: 422

Phone: 212-353-4387

Email: jennifer.weiser@cooper.edu

Address: 41 Cooper Sq. New York, NY 10003

 

Professor Jennifer Weiser joined the Chemical Engineering Department of Cooper Union in September 2017 (Assistant Professor 2017-2023, Associate Professor 2023-Present). Her background is in drug delivery, wound healing, and developing polymeric biomaterials for medical applications.

After receiving her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2006, Professor Weiser earned her M.S. in 2010 and her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering in 2012 from Cornell University. At Cornell, she bridged her Chemical Engineering background with her experience working as an organic chemist in the Exploratory Medicinal Chemistry Department at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals to create polymeric biomaterials for long-term controlled release and wound healing. Professor Weiser also took part in the inaugural year of Cornell University’s NSF GK-12 program, partnering with a local high school to teach STEM classes as “scientist-in-residence.”

Professor Weiser then joined the startup iFyber through a National Institutes of Health (NIH) STTR grant to explore proprietary polymeric materials developed in her graduate lab. There she built a lab and started the process of scale-up and in vivo testing for applications in post-surgical complications and hemostasis.

In 2014, Professor Weiser began an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA postdoctoral training fellowship in the Biomedical Engineering Department of Yale University to study electrospinning polymer scaffolds for wound healing applications. This work led to a collaboration with the Department of Otolaryngology in the Yale School of Medicine, helping to develop a device for post-surgical complications following total laryngectomy. From 2017-2018, she was appointed a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Surgery at the Yale School of Medicine.

For work done in collaboration with the Department of Cardiology at Columbia University, she was appointed an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medical Sciences (In Medicine) from 2018-2019.

In the Fall of 2021, Professor Weiser was named an associate editor of the journal Frontiers in Biomaterials Science.

In the Spring of 2024, Professor Weiser recevied a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award in biomedical sciences from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. She will join the faculty of Graz Technical University (TU Graz) in Austria as a visiting professor in the Institute of Chemistry and Technology of Biobased Systems (IBioSys) for the spring of the 2024-2025 academic year.

At Cooper Union, Professor Weiser continues focusing on work with biomedical applications. She has current collaborations with Mount Sinai, Montefiore, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Rowan University, and Politecnico di Milano. Furthermore, Professor Weiser is part of the council overseeing the Cooper Union-Mount Sinai collaborative exchange program. Professor Weiser has the pleasure of teaching ChE211 (Materials Science for Chemical Engineers), EID222 (Biomaterials), ChE351 (Separation Processo Principles), ChE371 and ChE372 (Senior Lab I, and II), ChE411 (Polymer Technology and Engineering), ChE474 (Drug Formulation and Delivery), and the interdisciplinary VIP38XD/48XD (Frontiers of Bioengineering Vertically Integrated Projects).