Kambez Benam PhD

Dr. Benam received his B.Sc. with First-Class Honours in Pharmacology from Newcastle University in 2007, and his D.Phil. in Clinical Medicine (Immunology) from the University of Oxford in 2011. His doctoral work focused on host-pathogen interactions, pulmonary mucosal immunity, and development of mild and highly pathogenic viral infection models.

As a Technology Development Fellow Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, he helped design and development a ‘human lung small airway-on-a-chip’ to model debilitating human lung disorders such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and respiratory viral infections in order to advance drug development strategies.

He also engineered a microfluidically coupled multi-compartment system to ‘breathe’ whole smoke from tobacco-related products, electronic cigarettes or any other aerosolized compound/drug in and out of small airway chip microchannels as occurs in vivo (‘breathing-smoking airway-on-a-chip’). He has received multiple awards including Baxter and Lush Young Investigator Awards and his work has been covered extensively by press. He is co-inventor on six pending patent applications and multiple reports of invention.