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, his research focused on leveraging human stem cells, organoids and novel drug delivery platforms towards discovery and development of 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 control their therapeutic cargo, which was shown to be highly effective in boosting their therapeutic impact in 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 Harvard Medical School Wyss Institute, where he led a research group leveraging Organ-on-Chip systems for human disease modeling 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 safety and efficacy of cannabinoid therapeutics for pain management and opioid use disorders. Dr. Levy recently came back to BWH as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology, where he is harnessing his scientific skills and industrial background with stem cell engineering, biomaterials, and artificial intelligence-based drug discovery platforms to develop novel and safe cell-based therapies.
His research yielded 5 patents, 27 invited lectures, 2 book chapters and 37 published manuscripts (>4000 citations) in peer-reviewed journals, 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, BWH Department of Medicine Early Career Mentoring Award, 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, and especially at HMS and BWH, Dr. Levy had extensive experience in supervising and mentoring dozens of undergraduate and graduate students as well as post-doctoral 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 the academia – training the next generation of talented scientists – with special emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Postdoctoral Fellows
Yisun Choi, PhD
Yi Sun joined the lab in November 2023 as a postdoctoral research fellow under the mentorship of Prof. Oren Levy and Jeffrey Karp. She obtained her Ph.D. in biotechnology from Yonsei University, supervised by Prof. Seung-Woo Cho. Her work primarily involves the development of biomaterials and tissue engineering strategies aimed at regenerative medicine. During her doctoral studies, she specialized in creating tissue-specific scaffolds from decellularized extracellular matrix and cultivating various organoids. Currently, Yi Sun is focused on enhancing drug screening platforms and disease models with organoids. Her goal is to innovate advanced culture platforms and biomaterials that improve drug delivery and tissue regeneration.
Undergraduates
Jinoo Baik
Jinoo joined the Oren Levy Lab as an undergraduate research trainee in January 2025 and works with Dr. Hyeseon Kim. He is a chemical engineering undergraduate at the University of Toronto.
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 a HBsc student at the University of Toronto pursuing a double major in Neuroscience and Pharmacology. Her current research interests include neuropharmacology and regenerative medicine.
Lab Coordinator
Lisa Talluto
Lisa 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 of supplies, and managing the on-boarding of new students and postdocs.
Lab Alumni
Ryu Kawajiri
Ryu 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 is an undergraduate at the University of Toronto.
Hyeseon Kim, PhD
Hyeseon joined the lab as a postdoctoral research fellow in October 2023, under the mentorship of Prof. Oren Levy and Jeffrey Karp. Hyeseon completed her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at Yonsei University with Prof. Hak-Joon Sung. Her research interests broadly included fabricating various biomaterials for biomedical applications. During her Ph.D., she worked on complex cell models with hydrogel and microfluidics and targeted drug delivery platforms by lipid-based nanoparticles to advance stem cell research and develop innovative treatments. Her work focused on drug screening of complex cell models and drug delivery platforms with biomaterials for different applications.
Saejin (Grace) Hur
Saejin joined the Oren Levy Lab as an undergraduate research trainee in March 2024 and worked with Dr. Yisun Choi. She is a biomedical engineering undergraduate at the University of Waterloo. Her primary interests included stem cells and neural engineering.