Dean Jennifer L. West presents associate professor of chemical engineering Steven Caliari with a certificate declaring him a University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science Copenhaver Fellow.
Steven R. Caliari has been named a University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science Copenhaver Fellow.
The title comes with an annual salary bonus and $5,000 in discretionary funds to support research and scholarship. Caliari will hold the title for three years or until he is promoted to full professor.
Caliari joined UVA’s faculty in August 2016 as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering with a secondary appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He was promoted to associate professor in 2022. He previously was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania.
Caliari’s lab designs, synthesizes and characterizes new biomaterials to explore the dynamic interplay between cells and their microenvironment, applying these platforms to address fundamental human health challenges in understanding disease and engineering tissues.
In 2020 Caliari received two prestigious early-career funding awards to support his lab’s biomaterials program, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award for Early-stage Investigators from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences.
He also was named one of 12 Young Innovators of Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering, a journal of the Biomedical Engineering Society, an honor recognizing some of the most innovative and impactful bioengineering studies carried out by junior faculty in the field.