Academic Collaborations

 

Francois Berthiaume, Ph.D

Francois Berthiaume is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Dr. Berthiaume received a BS degree in Chemical Engineering from Laval University, Quebec City, Canada, and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University. After post doctoral studies at the Center for Engineering in Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital / Harvard Medical School, he was promoted to faculty rank in the same institution. In 2009, he was recruited to the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rutgers University. His research has been funded by numerous awards from private, state, and federal agencies, including the Whitaker Foundation, the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, the New Jersey Commission on Spinal Cord Research, the Department of Defense, and the National Institutes of Health. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed papers.

Research interests:
Dr. Berthiaume’s research interests are in the general areas of tissue engineering and metabolic engineering, with a particular focus on technologies to promote wound healing.  In the area of skin wound healing, Dr. Berthiaume has extensive experience in animal models of burn injury as well as pressure sores, and in the development of various modalities to improve the wound healing process of these injuries. Recently, we have developed, using fusion protein technology, recombinant proteins that exhibit increased stability and efficacy in the chronic wound environment.

 

Laurie Joseph, Ph.D

Dr. Joseph has over 35 years of experience in toxicology having developed clinical and in vitro human models plus in vivo animal models to understand the fundamentals of cellular damage their response to environmental toxins. She received a B.S. in geology from The George Washington University, a M.S. and Ph.D. from The Ohio State University with post-doctoral training at Yale University and the University Connecticut Medical Center. Her present studies include skin, gut and vascular tissue wound repair with over 20 years of experience in the personal care industry. She is a member of the Personal Care Product Council, Society of Cosmetic Chemists, Society of Toxicology and American Academy of Dermatology. Prior to coming to Rutgers University, she was the senior skin biologist for Croda Inc. She has over 40 peer reviewed publications, over 100 presentations worldwide, is a journal reviewer and has extramural funding. Dr Joseph is an associate research professor in the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy at Rutgers University where she has mentored over 40 graduate and undergraduate students.  Her academic service includes membership in the New Jersey Institute for Food, Nutrition, and Health; Center for Lipid Research; the Rutgers School of Graduate Studies; and the Joint Graduate Program in Toxicology, Rutgers University Piscataway, NJ. Dr. Joseph’s primary research focus is in the development of in vivo, in vitro, and clinical models of skin wound repair with the goal of developing countermeasures to mitigate chemical warfare injuries.  Dr. Joseph is a member of the Rutgers University CounterACT Center for Excellence.

Research Interests:  Mechanism of skin injury and repair due to environmental toxins including vesicating agents, characterization of the molecular alterations during different stages of wound repair, and preparation of topical formulations to mitigate injury. Development of in vitro and clinical models of skin wound repair, in vitro models for study of transepithelial penetration of pharmaceutical and chemical agents via topical, oral and inhaled routes of administration.

 

Beth Murphy, Ph.D

 Beth Ann Murphy is a scientist whose career spans more than three decades in the pharmaceutical and life sciences biotech sectors. She was appointed as the Life Sciences Coordinator and Instructor of Professional Practice for Rutgers Professional Sciences Master’s Program in December 2019. In addition to being an active Rutgers faculty member, she is also founder of BAM Consulting, LLC—the mission of which is to share industry knowledge with scientist-entrepreneurs to help advance their ideas from concept to market—transforming ideas and innovations into commercialized products. In addition to a 25-year career as a research scientist at Merck & Co., Dr. Murphy held leadership and advisory positions at several startup /spinoffs that had their geneses in academic laboratories. She has extensive and holistic experiences in all aspects of drug discovery and development across multiple disease disciplines, and has contributed the success of innumerable drug discovery programs.Dr. Murphy is a member of numerous professional organizations including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Women in Science, and the New York Academy of Sciences. She is a regular study section member for the National Institutes of Health SBIR/STTR grant program for the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. She is an adjunct instructor with the National Science Foundation-sponsored Innovation Corps entrepreneurial training program. Dr. Murphy is the author of over 25 scientific papers published in peer review journals. She is passionate about promoting roles to advance equality for women in STEM-based fields and has spent significant time blending her industry experience and academic knowledge to develop and expand STEM education and STEM-based curricula. She has provided career-long mentorship to girls and women interested in careers in science.

 

Sanjeeva Murthy, Ph.D

Dr. Sanjeeva Murthy is a Materials Scientist and has been a research faculty at the New Jersey Center for Biomaterials, Rutgers University since 2007.  Before coming to Rutgers, he was an Associate Professor in Physics for more than 4 years at the University of Vermont.  Prior to that, he worked at Honeywell for 21 years, which he left in 2002 while he was a Senior Principal Scientist there.  He did his postdoctoral work at MIT, the New York State Department of Health and Carnegie Mellon University.  He obtained his Ph.D. in Materials Science from the University of Connecticut.  He came to the U.S. after obtaining a Master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India.

Research interests:
Dr. Murthy’s expertise is in the physical properties of materials, polymers processing, and fabrication of devices.  He develops structure-property relationships using a variety of techniques including rheology, and related techniques for tailoring polymers for biomedical applications.

 

William Welsh, Ph.D

Dr. William J. (Bill) Welsh holds the Norman H. Edelman Endowed Professorship in Bioinformatics in the Department of Pharmacology at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS), Rutgers University in Piscataway NJ. Concurrently, he serves as Associate Director of the Division of Cheminformatics of the Biomedical Informatics Shared Resource at the Rutgers-Cancer Institute of New Jersey (R-CINJ). He also serves as a faculty investigator at Princeton University in the Department of Chemistry.
Dr. Welsh received a B.S. degree magna cum laude in Chemistry from St. Joseph’s University (Philadelphia, PA). He earned a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physical Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA). He then conducted postdoctoral studies in computational physical chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH) and at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

 

MBS in Personal Care Chemistry

Rutgers offers a graduate degree in cosmetic chemistry as part of the Professional Science Master’s Program. This degree is a Master of Business and Science in Personal Care Chemistry and combines chemistry for the cosmetic industry with courses in Regulatory and Business. The Dermaceutics course is a required course in this degree. For information about this degree please see here: https://mbs.rutgers.edu/academic-programs