Executive Message

Robert E. Guldberg, PhD

Robert and Leona DeArmond Executive Director, Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact

Director, Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance at Oregon

Professor, Department of Bioengineering

Vice President, University of Oregon

A Letter from Robert Guldberg

From record enrollment to new startup companies, we had plenty to celebrate in 2024–2025 at the Knight Campus — and we have lots to look forward to as we continue to harness the momentum we've established and super-charge our mission of Science Advancing Society.

We're evolving into a regional hub of research and innovation and a world-class training ground for the next generation of pioneering innovators, leaders and disruptors.

In June, the Knight Campus Graduate Internship Program (KCGIP) welcomed its largest class ever. KCGIP continues to serve as a national model in which applied graduate education seamlessly connects talent to industry, enabling our graduates to thrive in high-demand fields.

That same month, we also celebrated the graduation of our inaugural cohort of PhD students in bioengineering — the University of Oregon's first engineering degree recipients. Our programs now compete with the top global centers for students and faculty, and when they arrive here, many are embracing our mission to develop and launch critical innovations on an accelerated timeline.

With construction nearly completed on Knight Campus Building 2, our growing influence is on clear display. The building will more than double our physical footprint, providing a new home for 17–20 additional research groups, expanded teaching spaces, advanced student makerspaces and collaborative environments that encourage invention — including a new core facility for biofabrication and bioanalysis and a second Papé Family Innovation Center.

UO is known for its iconoclastic innovation, from pioneering athletic performance to breakthrough technologies. The Knight Campus represents the next chapter in that story. We are fast becoming an irresistible destination for high-performing faculty and students — a flywheel for research, innovation and societal benefit — a center of excellence with global reach.

Thank you for being part of this journey.
 

Robert E. Guldberg

Vice President and Robert and Leona DeArmond Executive Director

Moira Kiltie

Senior Associate Vice President and Chief of Staff; Acting Manager, Papé Family Innovation Center

Danielle Benoit

Lorry Lokey Chair, Professor and Chair of the Department of Bioengineering

Bill Cresko

Lorry Lokey Chair; Professor of Bioengineering; Director, Center for Biomedical Data Science

Callie Johnston

Assistant Vice President for Development and Chief Development Officer

Stacey Wagner

Assistant Vice President for Master's Programs

Nathan Jacobs

Senior Director of Academic and Impact Programming

Lewis Taylor

Director of Communications

June 15, 2025

First-Ever In-Person Graduation Ceremony

The Knight Campus hosted its inaugural in-person graduation, celebrating more than 130 graduates and their families. The event included master's degree recipients across five KCGIP tracks and — for the first time — PhD recipients in the Department of Bioengineering: the University of Oregon's first-ever engineering degree recipients.

Danielle Benoit honored the first PhD cohort: "You are the very first graduates of this department. We couldn't have built this program without figuring it out with you. Thank you for being our pioneers."

June 11, 2025

Brewing Innovation Students Launch Community Collaboration

Undergraduates in the Knight Campus Brewing Innovation minor unveiled a special collaboration brew with Toby Schock, head brewer at the Wheel Apizza Pub, as part of Eugene Beer Week. The collaboration produced a South American-inspired chicha — a corn beer brewed using locally sourced Oaxacan green dent corn, herbs and flowers from Ecuador, and a wild culture introduced through tepache.

Launched in Fall 2024, the Brewing Innovation Program teaches students how to be innovators through the lens of beer and brewing, with activities taking place in the Knight Campus Fermentation Innovation Lab.

Science Knight Out 2025

Hutchison Shares Passion for Chemistry at Science Knight Out

Jim Hutchison, Knight Campus Senior Associate Vice President and Lorry Lokey Chair in Chemistry, delivered the ninth annual Science Knight Out lecture: "Tapping the Power of Chemistry: From Green Products to Brewing Innovation." A pioneer in green chemistry and nanoscience, Hutchison's work has led to products including the sustainable cleaning product DeFunkify, developed through his startup Dune Sciences.

91

Master's Student Graduates

90%

Graduates placed/hired within 3 months of graduating

93

New recruits admitted for Academic Year 2025–2026 (record)

98%

Program graduation rate

Undergraduate Scholars

Knight Campus Undergraduate Scholars Program

The program pairs promising undergraduates with research mentors — graduate students, postdocs, and faculty — immersing them in a 12-month research experience in Knight Campus-affiliated labs.

• Gender: 25% Male; 75% Female
• Ethnicity: 55% students of color; 45% white
• 20% are first-generation students
• 25% are transfer students
• 55% are enrolled in the Clark Honors College
• 70% are Oregon residents

Science Policy

From Lab Bench to Capitol Hill

PhD candidate Lia Strait, a researcher in Bob Guldberg's lab focused on improving bone regeneration, travelled to Washington, D.C., for the AAAS Catalyzing Advocacy in Science and Engineering (CASE) workshop. She and fellow PhD candidate Anne-Marie Barrett met with Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley and staffers from nearly all of Oregon's congressional delegation, sharing how federally funded research at UO is driving medical innovation.

Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance

Translating Research into Impact for Athletes

The Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance at Oregon supports research across the University of Oregon and partners with five institutions nationwide, extending their work globally to improve human health and performance.

Annual Spring Symposium

The Alliance hosted its annual Spring Symposium, themed "Translating Research into Impact on Athletes," featuring keynote talks from Dr. Cindy Chang (Chief Medical Officer, National Women's Soccer League) and Gillian Weir (Senior Biomechanist, New York Yankees).

Science in the Spotlight

Wu Tsai researchers expanded into podcasts and media interviews, with researchers appearing on the This is Oregon podcast and Alliance Associate Director Mike Hahn speaking with Runner's World about elite runner mechanics.

Center for Biomedical Data Science

The Hildegard Lamfrom Graduate Scholars Program

Established in honor of pioneering molecular biologist Hildegard Lamfrom, this program — created by her nephew Tim Boyle and his wife Mary — supports collaborative biomedical data science research between UO and OHSU. Since its launch, it has supported 10 graduate scholars.

Lamfrom Scholars apply data science to real biomedical challenges: Angela Crabtree (2023 cohort) automated breast cancer staging; Isis Diaz (2023 cohort) developed predictive models for lung cancer outcomes.

Hildegard Lamfrom is credited with providing some of the earliest experimental evidence for messenger RNA — paving the way for the 1965 Nobel Prize and establishing the central dogma of molecular biology: DNA makes RNA, which makes protein. More than 40 years after her passing, her legacy of tenacity lives on through the scholars program.

Synthetic Biology

Massive Datasets Are Changing the Fight Against Superbugs

Assistant Professor Calin Plesa is developing tools to scale up synthetic biology using DropSynth technology — packaging gene-building machinery into microscopic oil droplets, each acting as a tiny factory. His team created more than 1,500 variants of the gene DHFR and tested them in engineered E. coli, mapping which regions are vulnerable to antibiotics and which are prone to resistance. His startup, SynPlexity, is now working to commercialize DropSynth.

Advanced Manufacturing

Printing the Future: Revolutionizing 3D Fabrication

In a December 2024 publication in Advanced Materials Technologies, Patrick Hall (Dalton Lab) optimized volumetric additive manufacturing (VAM) — a technique that creates 3D structures using light. The team developed a recipe combining an inexpensive polymer with low concentrations of alginate that reduces costs from $25–50 per milliliter to just 2 cents per milliliter, making the technology dramatically more accessible.

Regenerative Medicine

Implantable Sensors Help Scientists Improve Injury Recovery

Scientists at the Knight Campus developed tiny implantable sensors that transmit real-time data about bone injury sites. Published in December 2024's Nature Regenerative Medicine, the study showed that a resistance-training rehabilitation program can significantly improve femur injuries in rats in just eight weeks — restoring bone to mechanical properties comparable to uninjured bones without biological stimulants.

New Faculty

Two New Faculty Members Join Department of Bioengineering

Sara Keller (Keller Lab, opening Building 2, 2026) is a Glasstone Research Fellow at the University of Oxford working on ultrasound-based tools to diagnose and treat biofilm infections. She was awarded the 2024 L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Rising Talent Award in the UK.

David Peeler (BRIDGE Lab, opening 2026) is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow who pioneered 3D-printed vaccine delivery systems and advanced RNA vaccine manufacturing at Imperial College London and Oxford.

Faculty Recognition

Hettiaratchi Earns Tenure

In June 2025, Marian Hettiaratchi was promoted to Associate Professor with indefinite tenure — the first bioengineering faculty member to receive tenure through promotion. Her lab develops specialized protein delivery systems combining protein engineering, biomaterial design, and computational modeling to control how and when proteins are delivered to damaged tissues.

Major Grant

Plesa Receives Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Grant

In February 2025, Assistant Professor Calin Plesa received a prestigious grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) as part of its Scaling Up Synthetic Biology program. The award will support scaling up DropSynth — assembling large libraries of genes rapidly and at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.

Danielle Benoit

Lorry Lokey Chair, Professor and Chair

Focus: Engineered extracellular matrices, targeted drug delivery nanotechnologies

Bala Ambati

Research Professor

Focus: Drug delivery, gene therapy, bioimaging

Bill Cresko

Lorry Lokey Chair, Professor

Focus: Computational genomics, host-microbe interactions, gene regulatory systems

Paul Dalton

Associate Professor, Bradshaw and Holzapfel Research Professor

Focus: Advanced manufacturing, high-resolution 3D printing, biofabrication

Felix Deku

Betsy and Greg Hatton Assistant Professor

Focus: Microelectrodes, thin-film devices, neural recording and stimulation

Tim Gardner

Associate Professor

Focus: Vocal learning, deep neural networks

Robert Guldberg

Professor, Vice President and Executive Director

Focus: Musculoskeletal mechanobiology, regenerative medicine, orthopedic medical devices

Marian Hettiaratchi

Associate Professor

Focus: Controlled protein delivery, affinity-based biomaterials, bone repair

Parisa Hosseinzadeh

Assistant Professor

Focus: Naturally occurring peptides, protein-based sensing, biosensors for pollutants

Sara Keller

Assistant Professor (joining 2026)

Focus: Ultrasound-based tools to diagnose and treat biofilm infections

Gabriella Lindberg

Assistant Professor

Focus: Bioinks for tissue engineering, 3D-bioassembly, personalized tissue models

Keat Ghee Ong

Professor

Focus: Implantable and wearable devices, wireless sensor technologies

David Peeler

Assistant Professor (joining 2026)

Focus: Biomaterials for immunomodulation, drug delivery, and genetic engineering

Calin Plesa

Assistant Professor

Focus: Large-scale protein engineering, sequence-function relationships

Nick Willett

Associate Professor

Focus: Cell therapies, bone regeneration, intra-articular therapeutic delivery

Start-up out of Knight Campus Dalton Lab

VivoTex

A biomedical startup transforming tissue engineering by using technology invented in the Dalton Lab to 3D print microfiber scaffolds that support cell growth. Collaborating with L'Oréal to create lifelike artificial skin models for faster product testing.

Start-up out of Knight Campus Plesa Lab

SynPlexity

A synthetic biology startup revolutionizing protein discovery by using technology invented in the Plesa Lab to create massive DNA libraries at breakthrough scale and cost. Collaborating with Birch Biosciences to develop plastic-degrading enzymes.

88

Proposals submitted

16

New awards

$11.8M

Total funding received — all awards

$9.7M

Total direct research expenditures

$75.8M

Cumulative research awards (includes amounts anticipated to FY31)

12

Total number of labs / principal investigators

FY19

FY20

FY21

FY22

FY23

FY24

FY25

$7.4M

Through 81 new gifts and pledges in FY25 — beyond the Knights' visionary philanthropy

$104.9M

Total cumulative philanthropy (beyond Knight gifts) in support of Knight Campus research, academic and innovation programs

New Program

Giustina Family Creates Fellowship Program to Support Knight Campus Graduate Students

Through a $4.4 million gift, the Giustina family — multi-generational Oregonians — established a new fellowship to support Knight Campus graduate students. The program is available to students who apply for highly competitive external research funding, such as NIH individual predoctoral fellowships or NSF Graduate Research Fellowships. Knight Campus students have achieved a 50% success rate on awarded grant submissions versus a 15% national average.

The first cohort included 20 fellows. To date, seven have received major external fellowships.

One grant to the Plesa Lab from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to support creation of massive, high-quality biological datasets that could train machine learning systems to fight cancer, accelerate drug development, and combat disease resistance.

20 new Knight Campus Undergraduate Scholars, participating in a year-long research experience in a Knight Campus-affiliated lab, all funded through philanthropic gifts.

20 fellows in the first cohort of the new endowed Giustina Knight Campus Fellowship program, which incentivizes Knight Campus graduate students to compete for prestigious external funding.

One new project, supported by the 4 Cornerstones Foundation, amplifies the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance at Oregon — bringing together expertise in physiology and biomechanics with women's soccer organizations to optimize performance and reduce ACL injury risk in female athletes.

Three times a year, the Knight Campus will now host its named Robert Family Entrepreneurship Speaker Series, bringing entrepreneurial luminaries to campus, thanks to a gift from Edward W. Robert in support of entrepreneurship and innovation.