Member Profile
Prabhas Moghe
Prefiguration of Stem Cell Phenotypes using High Dimensional Nuclear Organization.
Stem cells are dynamically influenced by a wide range of microenvironmental cues during lineage commitment. Understanding this process is a major challenge in engineering a niche that instructs stem cell... More »
About Me
Prabhas Moghe is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Chemical & Biochemical Engineering at Rutgers University. He is the director of the Biomedical Engineering graduate program jointly administered by Rutgers and Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ). He also holds appointment as Adjunct Professor in the Division of Bioengineering of the Department of Surgery at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, UMDNJ.
Dr. Moghe earned a B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering at the University of Bombay, a PhD. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota and pursued postdoctoral research in bioengineering at Harvard Medical School. An elected Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and the American Academy of Nanomedicine (AANM), Dr. Moghe has received several awards/honors for his research accomplishments, including the NSF CAREER Award, the Johnson & Johnson Discovery Award, Integra LifeSciences Excellence Award, Fellowship of the Rutgers Institute for Business, Engineering, Science & Technology (BEST); and several teaching and mentoring awards. An author of over 55 journal publications and over 150 presentations, he currently directs an NSF IGERT training program on Integrative Science and Engineering of Stem Cells (www.igert.rutgers.edu), a NSF funded Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT), a Stem Cell Core project on 3-D scaffolds for human embryonic stem cell engineering, and a major core within a NIH/NIBIB-funded P41 program grant on Cell Profiling of Polymeric Biomaterials (www.resbio.org).
Prabhas Moghe’s research has investigated and developed novel cell-interactive interfaces with synthetic biomaterials, which have applications to biotechnology and biomedicine. A total of 715 citations reference this body of scholarship to date. His research in nanobiomaterials and nanobiotechnology is focused along two distinct projects. In the first, the Moghe group and their collaborators have developed self-assembled micellar nanoparticles with potential as “nanolipoblockers” to reduce atherosclerosis. In the second project, matrix-functionalized albumin nanoparticles are being investigated to establish biodynamic interfaces to promote cellular motility and matrix assembly during wound repair; as well as for increased survival and differentiation of stem cells within three-dimensional scaffolds. In the area of cell-biomaterial interactions, Dr. Moghe’s team is combining new “high content” imaging of stem cell reporters with higher throughput platforms of combinatorially synthesized substrates, to accelerate the rational design of biomaterials “inductive” for strategic stem cell fates. In the area of stem cells, Dr. Moghe’s lab has recently proposed a new approach to accelerated differentiation of human embryonic stem cells using engineered feeder cells – the Moghe lab produced the first PhD at Rutgers in the area of research on human embryonic stem cells. The first NSF funded IGERT graduate training program on stem cells in the U.S. was conceptualized and founded in September 2008 with Dr. Moghe as its principal investigator (www.igert.rutgers.edu).
