Professor Joachim Kohn is the Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry at Rutgers University.  He also serves as the Director of the Rutgers-Cleveland Clinic Consortium of the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM).  He has served as Director of the New Jersey Center for Biomaterials since its establishment in 1997. He is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and the Chair of the International College of Fellows of Biomaterials Science and Engineering (IUSBSE).  He is the principal investigator of several leading federally-funded R&D programs such as the NIH-funded postdoctoral training program in Tissue Engineering, the NSF-funded Partnership for Innovation designed to explore new plant-synthetic hybrid biomaterials, and the NIH funded National Resource for Polymeric Biomaterials (RESBIO).

Professor Kohn's research interests focus on the development of new biomaterials for use in regenerative medicine. He pioneered the use of combinatorial and computational methods for the optimization of biomaterials for specific medical applications. He is mostly known for his seminal work on tyrosine-derived biomaterials – a new class of polymers that combine the non-toxicity of individual amino acids with the strength and process ability of high-quality engineering plastics.  He has contributed to the development of several new medical implants.  He has published over 200 scientific manuscripts and reviews and holds about 40 issued US patents.

Since 1997, Professor Kohn has received over $75 Million in research support from US government agencies, the New Jersey state government, and private corporations and foundations. He has gained extensive technology transfer experience. He is the scientific founder of three spin-off companies (VectraMed, TyRx Pharma, Trident Biomedical), and serves on the scientific advisory board of several other companies.  Innovative medical products using Kohn’s tyrosine-derived biomaterials are already in routine clinical use.  In 2008, Kohn testified before Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Energy and Commerce on “Treatments for an Ailing Economy: Protecting Health Care Coverage and Investing in Biomedical Research.”

In 2007, Professor Kohn was inducted into the New Jersey High-Tech Hall of Fame.  He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the prestigious Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award for best patent in New Jersey in the category of medical research, once in 1999 for his invention of tyrosine-derived polycarbonates, and once in 2006 for his invention of the first combinatorially designed library of polyarylates.  His other awards include the 2003 Clemson Award for Basic Science of the Society for Biomaterials, a 1997 Special Opportunity Award of the Whitaker Foundation, a 1993 Hoechst-Celanese Innovative Research Award, a 1992 Young Investigator Research Achievement Award of the Controlled Release Society, a 1992 Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence at Rutgers University, and a 1990 NIH Research Career Development Award. 

Recent publications from Professor Kohn’s laboratory, selected to show the breadth of research topics being investigated by Professor Kohn and his group members. 

• M. D. Treiser, E. H. Yang, S. Gordonov, D. M. Cohen, I. P. Androulakis, J. Kohn, C. S. Chen and P. V. Moghe, "Cytoskeleton-based forecasting of stem cell lineage fates", Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U S A, 2010, 107(2), 610-615.
  

• A. D. Costache, L. Sheihet, K. Zaveri, D. D. Knight and J. Kohn, "Polymer-drug interactions in tyrosine-derived triblock copolymer nanospheres:  A computational modeling approach", Mol Pharmaceutics, 2009, 6(5), 1620-1627.
  

• R. Rojas, N. K. Harris, K. Piotrowska and J. Kohn, "Evaluation of automated synthesis for chain and step-growth polymerizations:  Can robots replace the chemists", J Polym Sci: Part A: Polym Chem, 2009, 47(1), 49-58.
  

• H. J. Sung, P. Chandra, M. D. Treiser, E. Liu, C. P. Iovine, P. V. Moghe and J. Kohn, "Synthetic polymeric substrates as potent pro-oxidant versus anti-oxidant regulators of cytoskeletal remodeling and cell apoptosis", J. Cell Physiol., 2009, 218(3), 549-557.
  

• P. F. Holmes, M. Bohrer and J. Kohn, "Exploration of polymethacrylate structure-property correlations: Advances towards combinatorial and high-throughput methods for biomaterials discovery", Prog. Polym. Sci., 2008, 33, 787-796.
  

• V. Kholodovych, A. V. Gubskaya, M. Bohrer, N. Harris, D. Knight, J. Kohn and W. J. Welsh, "Prediction of biological response for large combinatorial libraries of biodegradable polymers: polymethacrylates as a test case", Polymer, 2008, 49, 2435-2439.
  

• L. Sheihet, P. Chandra, P. Batheja, D. Devore, J. Kohn and B. Michniak, "Tyrosine-derived nanospheres for enhanced topical skin penetration", Internat. J. Pharmaceutics, 2008, 350, 312-319.
  

• H. J. Sung, K. M. Sakala Labazzo, D. Bolikal, M. J. Weiner, R. Zimnisky and J. Kohn, "Angiogenic competency of biodegradable hydrogels fabricated from poly(ethylene glycol)-crosslinked tyrosine-derived polycarbonates", Europ. Cells Mater., 2008, 15, 77-87.
  

• Y. Yang, D. Bolikal, M. L. Becker, J. Kohn and C. G. Simon, "Combinatorial polymer scaffold libraries for screening cell-biomaterial interactions in 3D", Adv. Mater., 2008, 20, 2037-2043.
  

• A. V. Gubskaya, V. Kholodovych, D. Knight, J. Kohn and W. J. Welsh, "Prediction of fibrinogen adsorption for biodegradable polymers: Integration of molecular dynamics and surrogate modeling", Polymer, 2007, 48, 5788-5801.
  

• J. Kohn, W. J. Welsh and D. Knight, "A new approach to the rationale discovery of polymeric biomaterials", Biomaterials, 2007, 28, 4171-4177.
  

• E. Liu, M. D. Treiser, P. A. Johnson, P. Patel, A. Rege, J. Kohn and P. V. Moghe, "Quantitative biorelevant profiling of material microstructure within 3D porous scaffolds via multiphoton fluorescence microscopy", J. Biomed. Mater. Res. Part B: Appl. Biomater., 2007, 82B(2), 284-297.
  

• M. D. Treiser, E. Liu, R. A. Dubin, H.-J. Sung, J. Kohn and P. V. Moghe, "Profiling cell-biomaterial interactions via cell-based fluororeporter imaging", BioTechniques, 2007, 43(3), 361-368.
  

• D. T. Auguste, S. P. Armes, K. R. Brzezinska, T. J. Deming, J. Kohn and R. K. Prud’homme, "pH triggered release of protective poly(ethylene glycol)-b-polycation copolymers from liposomes", Biomaterials, 2006, 27, 2599-2608.
  

• A. Sousa, J. Schut, J. Kohn and M. Libera, "Nanoscale morphological changes during hydrolytic degradation and erosion of a bioresorbable polymer", Macromolecules, 2006, 39(21), 7306-7312.
  

• N. Weber, A. Pesnell, D. Bolikal, J. Zeltinger and J. Kohn, "Viscoelastic properties of fibrinogen adsorbed to the surface of biomaterials used in blood-contacting medical devices", Langmuir, 2006, 23(6), 3298-3304.
  

• S. D. Abramson, G. Alexe, P. L. Hammer and J. Kohn, "A computational approach to predicting cell growth on polymeric biomaterials", J. Biomed. Mat. Res, 2005, 73A(1), 116-124.
  

• J. Kohn and J. Zeltinger, "Degradable, drug-eluting stents:  A new frontier for the treatment of coronary artery disease", Future Drugs: Expert Review of Medical Devices, 2005, 2(6), 667-671.
  

• J. R. Smith, A. Seyda, N. Weber, D. Knight, S. Abramson and J. Kohn, "Integration of combinatorial synthesis, rapid screening, and computational modeling in biomaterials development", Macromol. Rapid Commun., 2004, 25, 127–140.
  

• D. M. Schachter and J. Kohn, "A synthetic polymer matrix for the delayed or pulsatile release of water-soluble peptides", J. Control. Rel., 2002, 78, 143-153.
  

• P. L. Ryan, R. A. Foty, J. Kohn and M. Steinberg, "Tissue spreading on implantable substrates is a competitive outcome of cell-cell vs. cell-substratum adhesivity", Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 2001, 98(8), 4323-4327.
  

• K. James, H. Levene, J. R. Parsons and J. Kohn, "Small changes in polymer chemistry have a large effect on the bone-implant interface: Evaluation of a series of degradable tyrosine-derived polycarbonates in bone defects", Biomaterials, 1999, 20(23/24), 2203-2212.