Principal Investigator
Oren Levy, PhD, MBA
Oren Levy is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Throughout his career, Dr. Oren Levy’s research focused on leveraging human stem cells, organoids and novel drug-delivery platforms to discover and develop cutting-edge treatments for devastating diseases, including inflammatory, neurodegenerative diseases and cancer. Dr. Levy has deep expertise in developing stem cell engineering approaches to advance cell targeting to disease sites post-infusion and to control the delivery of therapeutic cargo, which has been shown to be highly effective in boosting therapeutic impact across multiple disease models, including central nervous system inflammation and prostate cancer.
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Aiming to explore organ-level in vitro systems, Dr. Levy also spent two years at the Wyss Institute at Harvard Medical School, where he led a research group leveraging Organ-on-Chip systems for human disease modelling and drug discovery. He then transitioned to industry and served for 3 years as Vice President of R&D in one of the largest privately held cannabinoid therapeutics companies in the US. In this role, he led a research team focused on pre-clinical and clinical development of cannabinoid delivery platforms, aiming to maximize the safety and efficacy of cannabinoid therapeutics for pain management and opioid use disorders. Dr. Levy recently returned to BWH as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology, where he is harnessing his scientific and industrial background in stem cell engineering, biomaterials, and artificial intelligence-based drug discovery platforms to develop novel, safe cell-based therapies.
His research yielded 5 patents, 27 invited lectures, 2 book chapters, and 37 peer-reviewed publications (>4000 citations), including Cell Stem Cell, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Cell Reports, and Blood. Dr. Levy was the corresponding author on a paper selected for Cell Stem Cell Best of 2016, and he has also won the William Randolph Hearst Foundation Young Investigator in Medicine Award, the BWH Department of Medicine Early Career Mentoring Award, the Partners HealthCare Innovation Award and the Charles A. King Fellowship. His lab is currently funded by multiple agencies, including the Zoll Foundation and the NIH ARPA-H program.
During his career, especially at HMS and BWH, Dr. Levy had extensive experience supervising and mentoring dozens of undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, as reflected by his BWH Department of Medicine Early Career Mentoring Award. Dr. Levy regards mentoring as the most valuable aspect of a Principal Investigator’s work in academia – training the next generation of talented scientists – with special emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Postdoctoral Research Fellows
Michael Cronce, PhD
Michael Cronce joined the lab as a postdoctoral research fellow in October 2025 under the mentorship of Prof. Oren Levy. He completed his joint PhD program in Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering from the UC Berkeley College of Engineering and the University of California, San Francisco, in 2022. His research focuses on therapeutic R&D for infectious diseases with a minor focus on synthetic biology and metabolic engineering.
Undergraduate Students
Rena Xu
Rena Xu joined the Oren Levy Lab as an undergraduate research trainee in May 2025, under the mentorship of Dr. Oren Levy and Dr. Yisun Choi. She is currently an HBSc student at the University of Toronto pursuing a double major in Neuroscience and Pharmacology. Her current research interests include neuropharmacology and regenerative medicine.
Yat Hei (Aidan) Ng
Aidan Ng joined the Oren Levy Lab as an undergraduate research trainee in November 2025, under the mentorship of Dr. Oren Levy, Dr. Michael Cronce, and Dr. Snigdha Roy Barman. He is currently an HBSc student at the University of Toronto Scarborough, pursuing a double major in Neuroscience (Co-op) and Biochemistry, with a minor in Psychology.
Lab Coordinator
Lisa Talluto
Lisa Talluto oversees the administration of the Center for Accelerated Medical Innovation (CAMI) and the associated labs, including the Levy Lab, Joshi Lab, Yuhan Lab, and Karp Lab. This includes fiscal/budget management, grant management, supervision of lab personnel activities, inventory management, ordering supplies, and onboarding new students and postdocs.
Lab Alumni
Postdoctoral Research Fellows
Snigdha Roy Barman, PhD
Snigdha Roy Barman, PhD
Snigdha Roy Barman joined the lab as a postdoctoral research fellow in October 2025 under the mentorship of Prof. Oren Levy. She obtained her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, in 2023 under the supervision of Prof. Zong-Hong Lin. Her doctoral thesis focused on the development of self-powered bioelectronic devices based on triboelectric and piezoelectric nanogenerators for tissue engineering and healthcare monitoring applications. She embarked on her postdoctoral research as an Institute of Eminence Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, India, in the lab of Prof. Siddharth Jhunjhunwala, where she explored the immunomodulatory activity of electroactive biomaterials to accelerate chronic wound regeneration. At the lab, she worked on developing functional biomaterials for stem cell biology and tissue regeneration. Through her work, she aims to advance translational biomaterial interfaces for precision regenerative medicine.
Yisun Choi, PhD
Yisun Choi, PhD
Yisun Choi joined the lab in November 2023 as a postdoctoral research fellow under the mentorship of Prof. Oren Levy and Jeffrey Karp. She obtained her PhD in biotechnology from Yonsei University under the supervision of Prof. Seung-Woo Cho. Her work primarily involves developing biomaterials and tissue-engineering strategies for regenerative medicine. During her doctoral studies, she specialized in creating tissue-specific scaffolds from decellularized extracellular matrix and cultivating various organoids. Yisun focused on enhancing drug-screening platforms and disease models using organoids. Her goal in the lab was to innovate advanced culture platforms and biomaterials that improve drug delivery and tissue regeneration.
Hyeseon Kim, PhD
Hyeseon Kim, PhD
Hyeseon Kim joined the lab as a postdoctoral research fellow in October 2023 under the mentorship of Prof. Oren Levy and Jeffrey Karp. Hyeseon completed her PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Yonsei University with Prof. Hak-Joon Sung. Her research interests broadly included fabricating various biomaterials for biomedical applications. During her PhD, she worked on complex cell models using hydrogels and microfluidics, and on targeted drug-delivery platforms using lipid-based nanoparticles to advance stem cell research and develop innovative treatments. Her work focused on drug screening in complex cell models and on drug delivery platforms using biomaterials for various applications.
Undergraduate Students
Qingyuan (Alice) Liu
Qingyuan (Alice) Liu
Alice Liu joined the lab in October 2025 as an undergraduate Research Trainee. She was pursuing a Bachelor of Applied Science in Materials Engineering at the University of Toronto during her internship. Her research interests focus on bioinspired materials for biomedical and sustainability applications.
Jinoo Baik
Jinoo Baik
Jinoo Baik joined the Oren Levy Lab as an undergraduate research trainee in January 2025 and works with Dr. Hyeseon Kim. He was a chemical engineering undergraduate at the University of Toronto during his internship.
Ryu Kawajiri
Ryu Kawajiri
Ryu Kawajiri joined the Oren Levy Lab as an undergraduate research trainee in May 2024, under the mentorship of Prof. Oren Levy, Dr. Hyeseon Kim, and Dr. Yisun Choi. He was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto during his internship.
Saejin (Grace) Hur
Saejin (Grace) Hur
Grace Hur joined the Oren Levy Lab as an undergraduate research trainee in March 2024 and worked with Dr. Yisun Choi. She was a biomedical engineering undergraduate at the University of Waterloo during her internship. Her primary interests included stem cells and neural engineering.