Philip LeDuc


Philip LeDuc is the William J. Brown Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the Founding Director of its Center for the Mechanics and Engineering of Cellular Systems. He is in the department of Mechanical Engineering, but also has appointments in Biological Sciences, Computational Biology, Biomedical Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering. LeDuc works at the intersection of mechanical engineering and biology.

Biography

LeDuc earned his bachelor's degree and master's degree in mechanical engineering from North Carolina State University in 1993 and 1995, respectively. In 1998, he completed his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University. From 1999 to 2002, LeDuc was a research fellow at Children's Hospital/Harvard Medical School.
In 2002, LeDuc became an assistant professor in mechanical engineering = at CMU. He was promoted to associate professor in 2007 and full professor in 2011.

Awards

*LeDuc has received a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Award , National Science Foundation CAREER and a Beckman Young Investigator Award . He is an elected fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and American Institute for Medical Biological Engineering. At CMU, he has served as the Faculty Chair for the College of Engineering and is the founding director of the Center for the Mechanics and Engineering of Cellular Systems. He also has been a founder of many companies including Lifeware Labs and Innovalgae.
His wife, Rachel, and Philip have a daughter and two sons. He has been involved with many philanthropic organizations including raising money for non-profit organizations and mission trips to Africa and Armenia

Research

Philip LeDuc has always been fascinated by nature and machines. When he was younger, he would take apart lawn mowers and also would admire nature for its wonderfully unique features. These two seemingly unrelated areas have lead him down fascinating paths of merging engineering and biology. As an engineer, he was trained to think about systems such as planes, trains, and automobiles, and now he has a similar approach but the “systems” that he investigates are biology. These biological systems include humans as he studies diseases from cancer to neurology, but even more interesting is his passion for non-mammalian systems. These systems include plants, energy generating bacteria, developmental biology systems, etc. He is fascinated by unique features that have evolved over history for different organisms and if these advantages can be used to help people. He is fascinated with the idea of finding unifying principles linking different systems together. Along with his scientific pursuits, he also challenges himself with how to use what he has learned toward translational systems to develop technology and approaches to better mankind.

Selected works

LeDuc is the author of over 110 peer-reviewed publications. Some selected ones are:
Corresponding Author