Incoming chair of the Department of Bioengineering Catherine Klapperich comes to UC Santa Barbara after twenty-three years at Boston University’s College of Engineering, where she focused her research on the intersection of engineering and women’s health. That included developing models of female reproductive tissue, medical devices, and diagnostics for infectious diseases that can be used in the field. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she led the design and rapid implementation of the robotic campus COVID-19 testing facility, where nearly 2.5 million COVID-19 PCR tests were administered between July 2020 and May 2022. She is continuing to study tools to monitor hormones and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and is developing microscale human-based laboratory models of disease of the female reproductive system.
In July, Klapperich will take the helm of a department that, since its launch in 2024, has already attracted award-winning faculty, funding for groundbreaking research, and talented graduate students to its new doctoral program. Under the guidance of founding chair Beth Pruitt and, starting in 2025, of interim chair Michelle O’Malley, the department has become an integral part of campus facilities and centers such as the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnology and the NSF BioFoundry for Extreme and Exceptional Fungi, Archaea and Bacteria (ExFAB).
ExFAB director O’Malley, who is a professor of chemical engineering and bioengineering, is looking forward to the role that Klapperich will play in expanding the impact and reputation of these institutes, and of the department as a whole. “I’m excited to have Cathie join us as she has a proven track record in bringing people together and running core facilities that enable unique, collaborative research,” O’Malley said. “This is very well aligned with what we do best at UCSB and what makes our new Bioengineering Department stand out among our peers.”
“The Department of Bioengineering has already accomplished so much through the vision and hard work of Beth Pruitt and Michelle O'Malley," said Umesh Mishra, dean of The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering. "We are very fortunate to welcome Catherine Klapperich as chair to lead the department into a very exciting future and to expand its research and academic impact even further."
We spoke with her in April.
Q: What brings you back to California?
Catherine Klapperich: I did my PhD at UC Berkeley, and one of the things I loved about the UC system back then was the diversity of people and experiences and backgrounds.. As a graduate student, I felt an energy among the students and the undergraduates I worked with. They were very engaged, very interested in research, and had a drive that was different from what I had experienced previously. I'm excited to be coming back to California, both because I love it there, and because it’s a great opportunity to see, understand, and build upon the strengths of this department, which was founded only a few years ago.
Q: Bioengineering has ties to many new centers and cutting-edge facilities across campus. Along with becoming the department chair, you will be especially involved with one of these, the Mammalian BioFoundry, as co-director and as a researcher. Can you talk about that?
CK: Back in 2023, Michelle O’Malley led a campus-wide initiative to design two new “biofoundries” for UCSB with funding from the DoD — these are facilities that speed up the pace of discovery by miniaturizing biological reactions in small plates, which are analyzed by powerful instruments through robotics and automation. Through this effort, two facilities were built: one for microbial cells (now known as the NSF ExFAB BioFoundry) and the other for mammalian and multi-cellular platforms. Together with Max Wilson in Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology, we will co-direct the Mammalian Biofoundry and open it up to users across campus to do high-throughput experiments on mammalian cells and tissues that could lead to breakthroughs in biomedicine and human health applications.
With the Mammalian BioFoundry, I’ll be examining human cells taken from menstrual effluent, uterine fibroids, and placental cells. It's interesting to think about what we can learn by growing and imaging these cells over time in this automated system. Mainly, I'm interested in looking at hormones during the menopause transition, because a lot of abrupt changes in systemic health that happen for women during that time may be related to hormone changes. Typically, these hormones are tested once, or once every twenty-four hours in a person, rather than monitored continuously over longer periods. In the Biofoundry, we can do continuous live-cell experiments, and, hopefully, start to understand what's happening to some of these cells in a more continuous way. The facility is a huge opportunity for the department, and for the entire campus.
The UCSB Center for Stem Cell Biology and Engineering is neighbors with the BioFoundry, so I'm really hoping that the synergies between those two places will lead to new and exciting experiments. Together, ExFAB and the Mammalian BioFoundry offer opportunities to conduct larger-scale synthetic biology experiments both in microbes and in human cells or other mammalian cells.There are also opportunities to tap industry, both in the Santa Barbara area and potentially outside of it, to bring people who are interested in these kinds of high-throughput experiments into the fold.
Q: What was the path that led to the kind of research you’ll be doing at UCSB?
CK: Near the end of my PhD, I became interested in how cells and biomaterials interact. But after my PhD, I went to work. It was 2000, and all my friends were in Silicon Valley trying to make their fortunes there — and I thought, OK, I'll join a startup, too. I got a job at a startup making microfluidic devices to develop “labs on a chip,” which take techniques performed in a laboratory — such as collecting and analyzing specimens — and shrink them down to fit on a surface that’s a centimeter or smaller. They needed an engineer who was interested in polymer surfaces, which was my specialty.
At some point, I realized that we could also use those tiny chips to diagnose infectious diseases if we could design them to look for specific molecules in complex human samples. So when I went to do my postdoc in molecular biology with chemist and Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi, who’s now at Stanford, one of my goals was to learn a lot of these diagnostic techniques, with the idea that we might be able to do diagnostics on a smaller platform.
By the time I was ready to start my own lab, I knew I wanted to focus on this diagnostic work, with a particular focus on conditions that affect women. Sexually transmitted infections were high on my list, so a lot of my point-of-care diagnostic work is in that space.
Q: This seems exciting, because you don’t often hear “engineering” and “women’s health” in the same sentence.
CK: True, and there are a lot of examples of inappropriate design in women's health, particularly in drug design or delivery — things that were overlooked or weren't optimal for women either in terms of their smaller size relative to men or their hormones, which are also different than men’s. I teach case studies where I'm asking questions like: Why did this not work? How might this have been different? If we had a more inclusive design team, what experiments could they have done to avoid this? Women’s health from all sides — the good and the bad — informs what I do.
We’ve been working on isolating primary cells from female human primary tissues tissue engineering and for human-based laboratory models of disease. We’re interested in looking at things like endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which could give us information about how our bodies are interacting with the environment or how the environment might be contaminating us. This work ties into many larger-scale department and college projects. It’s really exciting to be coming to a place that has strength in environmental monitoring and bioengineering of the environment.
Beyond the College of Engineering, UCSB has marine biologists and people looking at the land-water interface, and researchers doing large-scale data work related to women’s health. I see a lot of synergies and opportunities to work together across the department, the college, and, hopefully, the university.
I'm really excited to get started, and I'm excited about what's been built already. It's a great foundation. The junior faculty are just fabulous, and there are many people who are leaders in their field at the mid-career or senior-faculty level. Getting those folks to work together on new problems or long-term problems that haven't yet been addressed is one of the most exciting parts of coming to a place like UCSB because of the openness and how excited people are to work together.
