School of Engineering
Brown-RISD Master of Arts in Design Engineering

Celinda Kofron

Brown Associate Director of the Center for Biomedical Engineering, Brown Lecturer

Biography

Dr. Kofron is a lecturer in the School of Engineering and the Associate Director of the Center for Biomedical Engineering. She earned her Sc.B. and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at Brown University. She was an American Association of University Women Predoctoral Fellow, an American Heart Association Founders Affiliate Postdoctoral Fellow, and a National Institutes of Health Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Postdoctoral Fellow.

She has more than 10 years of experience in mentoring student research projects and has taught the biomedical engineering capstone design course for the last 5 years. She redesigned the capstone curriculum with Anubhav Tripathi in 2016 to integrate students from diverse disciplines (BME, STEM and social science disciplines, and RISD students) working directly with clinicians and healthcare professionals to address their engineering design challenges. In the last four years, students in this course have worked closely with more than 27 clinicians at RIH, Women & Infants, and beyond to produce 35 collaborative projects and in the process have filed 5 provisional patents and won 3 recent design competitions

She was awarded the Tau Beta Pi Excellence in Teaching Award and Rhode Island Monthly Tech 10 Award for Tech Education, and she mentored a team of Brown undergraduate students that was awarded 1st place in the Biomedical Engineering Coulter College Design and Pitch Competition. She has also served as a mentor and/or judge for Brown Hack Health and Design+Health at Alpert Medical School. In almost two decades at Brown as student through faculty, she has built a broad network of local biology, engineering, industry, and clinical collaborators.