Sidi A BencherifNortheastern University, Boston, United States
Biography
Dr. Sidi A. Bencherif received in 2009 a Ph.D. degree in Chemistry under the supervision of Profs. Matyjaszewski and Washburn at Carnegie Mellon University. His work focused primarily on developing complex degradable synthetic and semi-synthetic polymeric scaffolds for biomedical applications. Following his PhD, he was initially appointed from 2009 to 2012 as a postdoctoral researcher and later from 2012 as a researcher associate in the laboratory of Prof. David Mooney at Harvard University and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. In 2016, he joined the department of Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University as an Assistant Professor. His research interests included developing naturally derived biomaterials that can be used for tissue engineering, drug delivery, immunotherapy, and studies into fundamental cell-biomaterial interactions. Dr. Bencherif has authored and co-authored over 50 journal articles in top journals (Science, PNAS, Nature Materials, etc), international conference proceedings, reviews and patent applications, and is the recipient of several fellowships, honors and awards.
Research Interest
Dr. Sidi Bencherif?s research interest primarily lies at the interface of polymeric biomaterials design, drug delivery, cell transplantation and bioengineering to develop next-generation approaches in cancer immunotherapy. The core of his work is to develop minimally invasive immunostimulatory biomaterials that generate immune responses with specific, tunable characteristics. His research has two complementary elements which include basic evaluations to understand the interactions between biomaterials and immune cells and tissues, and to design biomaterial-based vaccines that tune or modulate immune responses in the context of cancer. He studies the influence of biomaterial chemistry on immunogenicity with the goal of developing design principles and technologies with improved immunomodulatory activity. Polymeric systems ranging from degradable polymer microparticles, to nanostructured hybrid biomaterials, and to injectable macroporous hydrogels are investigated for their immunomodulation capacities. These biomaterials are studied in cells and animal models, incorporating tools from polymer chemistry, engineering, basic biology, and immunology.