Woojin Han, PhD

Dr. Woojin Han is an Assistant Professor in the Leni and Peter W. May Department of Orthopaedics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Han leads the Laboratory for Cell-Instructive Biomaterials and Regenerative Engineering. His team applies biomaterials and bioengineering approaches to study skeletal muscle-resident stem and progenitor cell mechanobiology, cell-matrix interactions, and disease modeling, with the long-term goal to engineer therapies for treating skeletal muscle trauma and diseases. Dr. Han received his B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Rochester. He then completed his M.S.E and Ph.D. in Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. His graduate work established how applied tissue-level mechanical strain is transferred to the underlying cells and regulates early cell responses in fiber-reinforced soft connective tissues. Using these findings as guiding criteria, Dr. Han and his team also developed a tissue-engineered platform that mimics the multi-scale structure-function relationships of the native fibrocartilaginous tissues, which enables a more controlled investigation of multi-scale biomechanics and mechanobiology. After completing his graduate studies, he pursued postdoctoral training at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he engineered fully synthetic, modular, and cell-instructive biomaterial for facilitating the transplantation and engraftment of muscle stem/satellite cells in the context of skeletal muscle trauma and diseases, such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy. He joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor of Orthopaedics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in January 2021.

 For more information, please see Han Lab and Orthopaedic Research Lab pages.