Yun Chen, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and member of the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology and the Center for Cell Dynamics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, has been recognized with a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award meant to help develop the next generation of academic scientists, mathematicians, and engineers who focus a significant portion of their research on national security needs.

Chen’s award project is “Fibrosis, Inflammation, Revascularization, and Migration (FIRM) Modulation for Muscle Regeneration.” Her research focuses on studying how biophysical and biochemical factors are coordinated to achieve homeostasis, or to facilitate disease, across molecular, cellular and tissue levels. She directs the Mechanical Engineering of Wet-materials (MEOW) Lab that works to develop multiscale, multimodal imaging tools to investigate how mechanics integrate with other biophysical and biochemical factors to sustain normal physiology or to cause pathology.