Nelson, leading tissue engineer, named fellow of Biomedical Engineering Society

Written by
Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Oct. 23, 2024

Celeste Nelson, a leading expert in tissue engineering, has been named a Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society, recognizing her contributions to the understanding of multicellular tissues in the context of normal development and disease.

Nelson, the Wilke Family Professor in Bioengineering and professor of chemical and biological engineering, seeks to answer fundamental questions about the architecture of living tissues and organs. How are those architectures determined? How do cells integrate complex biological signals to direct organ development? Her research group has published groundbreaking work on the development of bird, mammal and reptile lungs. 

The Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) named 12 fellows to the 2024 class. Fellows have demonstrated impactful achievements and made significant contributions to the biomedical engineering community and to BMES, according to the organization’s announcement. The new class will be honored at the BMES annual meeting in Baltimore on Oct. 24.

After earning S.B. degrees in both chemical engineering and biology at MIT in 1998, Nelson attended the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she was awarded her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering in 2003. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Mina Bissell’s group in the Life Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Nelso has received a Packard Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship and a Faculty Scholar award from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, among many other honors. Her teaching has been honored by the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s Distinguished Teacher Award and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. She joined Princeton in 2007.