Dr. Kelly M. Schultz

Bio

Dr. Kelly M. Schultz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Lehigh University. She obtained her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Northeastern University in 2006 and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering with Professor Eric Furst from the University of Delaware in 2011 as a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow. While at Delaware, she participated in the American Chemical Society Excellence in Graduate Polymers Research Symposium and was selected as the Fraser and Shirley Russell Teaching Fellow. Following her PhD, she was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute postdoctoral research associate at the University of Colorado at Boulder working in the laboratory of Professor Kristi Anseth. As a postdoc, she was invited to participate in the Distinguished Young Scholars Summer Seminar Series at the University of Washington. She began her position as Assistant Professor at Lehigh University in 2013 and was a P.C. Rossin Assistant Professor in 2016 – 2018. Dr. Schultz was named one of TA Instruments Distinguished Young Rheologists (2014), she was selected to attend the Frontiers of Engineering program hosted by the National Academy of Engineering (2016) and was awarded a NSF CAREER award in 2018. Dr. Schultz and her research group study emerging hydrogel materials developed for biological applications, such as wound healing and tissue regeneration. Of particular interest is the development of bulk and microrheological techniques that measure how 3D encapsulated human mesenchymal stem cells degrade and remodel synthetic hydrogel scaffolds during motility.