Director, Institute of NanoBioTechnology
Professor, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Whiting School of Engineering; and Department of Biomedical Engineering, Translational Tissue Engineering Center, School of Medicine

Prof. Mao received his B.S. in Chemistry in 1988 and Ph.D. in Polymer Chemistry in 1993 from Wuhan University in China.  He completed his postdoctoral training with Prof. Kam W. Leong in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine from 1995 to 1998; and served as a co-principal investigator (with Prof. Leong) at Johns Hopkins in Singapore from 1999 to 2003 and as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Department of Materials Science at National University of Singapore.  He joined Departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Biomedical Engineering as an Assistant Professor in 2003 and was promoted to Associate and Full Professor in 2009 and 2013, respectively. 

Prof. Mao’s research interests include biomaterials engineering for regenerative medicine, delivery of molecular and cellular therapeutics, and immunoengineering.  His lab has developed nanofiber scaffolds from synthetic and natural biomaterials for engineering and delivery of stem cells and regeneration of soft tissues.  His lab also established nanoparticle manufacturing platforms for controlled assembly of nanotherapeutics to improve the delivery efficiency of DNA, RNA and protein therapeutics and vaccines. 

Prof. Mao serves as an Associate and Handling Editor of Biomaterials and on the editorial boards of ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering and Journal of Materials Chemistry B.  He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed research articles and is a co-inventor of 31 U.S. patents and more than a dozen of provisional applications.  He has been elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, Royal Society of Chemistry, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.