Jonathan T. Butcher PhD

Jonathan Butcher currently directs the Cardiovascular Developmental Bioengineering Laboratory in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University. He joined the department in July 2007 as an Assistant Professor.

Prior to Cornell, Jonathan graduated in 2000 with a dual BS/MS in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Virginia, where he studied impact biomechanics at the automobile safety laboratory. Jonathan earned his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech in 2004, focusing on the mechanobiology of the aortic valve under the mentorship of Dr. Robert Nerem. There he discovered unique mechanosensitive properties of valvular endothelial biology and developed the first completely biological tissue engineered heart valve leaflet using native cells. This led him to study further into developmental biology as a NIH postdoctoral fellow in the departments of Cell Biology and Anatomy and Pediatrics Cardiology at the Medical University of South Carolina under the mentorship of Dr. Roger Markwald. He trained in cell and molecular biology of embryonic heart development while developing novel technologies for probing biophysical perturbations of these processes. He won the BMES 2009 Rita Schaffer Young Investigator Award for the unique way in which he has combined developmental biology with engineering for applications in regenerative medicine.