Stelios Andreadis elected Fellow of AIChE

by Nicole Capozziello

Fellow is AIChE’s highest grade of membership. The honor reaffirms the high esteem with which colleagues and peers view an individual’s distinctive professional achievements and accomplishments.

“Stelios is widely recognized as a top researcher in biomedical engineering within the chemical engineering community, and his recognition as a Fellow of AIChE is well-deserved,” says Mark Swihart, SUNY and UB Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. “His research is producing major advances with important health impacts and his leadership of the Cell, Gene and Tissue Engineering Center is raising the profile of our department and of bioengineering research at UB.”

Andreadis is an internationally recognized leader in the field of stem cell bioengineering, in particular, cardiovascular, neural, skeletal muscle, skin, and gland tissue engineering and regeneration. His pioneering work has led to improved sources of stem cells, novel biomaterials (elastomers, hydrogels) for protein, gene and delivery, and improved understanding of molecular events for improving tissue engineered products. More recently, his work led to improved understanding of vascular and skeletal muscle aging and how to reverse it, shed light into the role of the immune system in vascular endothelialization and regeneration and resulted in real world products to replace arteries in patients.

His research interests span a wide spectrum from fundamental to technological to pre-clinical/translational research. It is highly interdisciplinary and is facilitated by collaboration with researchers across the University at Buffalo, from the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Dental School, Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, and the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

He co-founded Angiograft, LLC to commercialize the cell-free vascular grafts that were developed in his laboratory as arterial replacement grafts for treatment of cardiovascular disease.

Andreadis has an exemplary record of continuous, peer-reviewed funding, having received more than $25 million in research support from public and private sources, including the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, NYSTEM and private foundations. He has published 140 peer-reviewed publications and conference proceedings and delivered more than 80 invited seminars. He has advised 34 PhD students, 19 MS students, five post-doctoral research fellows and more than 50 undergraduate researchers.

He is the director of the UB Cell, Gene and Tissue Engineering Center, and served as director of the Stem Cells in Regenerative Medicine (SCiRM) Training Program, which was funded by NYSTEM to train students in stem cell biology and bioengineering and applications of stem cells in regenerative medicine. He also served as chair of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering from 2012 to 2018.

He has received numerous accolades, including being elected as a Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) and the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). He received the Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring Award from UB in 2018, a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Scholarship and Creative Activities in 2014, an NSF CAREER Award in 2000 and a Whitaker Foundation Young Investigator Award in 1999.

A University at Buffalo faculty member since 1998, Andreadis received his PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining UB, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Engineering in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he worked in the areas of gene therapy, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.