Denis Wirtz is a co-founder and former co-director of INBT. He is the Vice Provost for Research and director of the NCI-funded Physical Sciences-Oncology Center under INBT. He has joint appointments in the Materials Science and Engineering Department and and Oncology is the Theophilus Halley Smoot Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the Whiting School of Engineering. His research involves the properties and interactions between adjacent cells and the role of cellular architecture in nuclear shape and gene expression. Cell biophysics, single molecule manipulation studies, intracellular particle trafficking, and nanotechnology in biology and medicine are among his other research projects. Dr. Wirtz earned his Engineering Physics degree at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium and M.Sc. and PhD in Chemical Engineering at Stanford University in 1993. He joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1994 and has joint appointments. He was a winner of the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award and the Whitaker Foundation Biomedical Engineering Foundation Award.