Jan Lammerding

Jan Lammerding is a Professor in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering and a member of the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology at Cornell University. He earned a Diplom-Ingenieur (Dipl.-Ing.) degree in Mechanical Engineering from RWTH Aachen in his native Germany and a Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) degree from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College. He then completed his Ph.D. in Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he studied subcellular biomechanics and mechanotransduction signaling with Drs. Roger Kamm (MIT) and Richard T. Lee (Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School). Following a brief postdoctoral fellowship in Dr. Lee’s laboratory, he began his faculty career at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital and concurrently taught in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT before joining Cornell University in 2011.

Research in the Lammerding laboratory focuses on developing novel technologies to investigate the interplay between cellular mechanics and function, with a particular emphasis on the cell nucleus and its response to mechanical forces. Dr. Lammerding is a pioneer and internationally recognized leader in the field of nuclear mechanobiology. He has made numerous contributions, including highlighting the importance of the nuclear envelope in determining the mechanical behavior of the cell nucleus, elucidating how the nucleus participates in transducing mechanical stimuli into biochemical signals (“nuclear mechanotransduction”), and defining the role of nuclear mechanobiology in human diseases. The Lammerding laboratory aims to (1) determine the molecular mechanisms responsible for muscular dystrophies, cardiomyopathies, and other diseases linked to defects in nuclear mechanobiology; (2) identify and assess novel therapeutic strategies targeting these mechanisms; and (3) gain a deeper understanding of the fundamental principles by which cellular biomechanics modulate biological functions and vice versa. Toward this goal, the Lammerding group uses an interdisciplinary research approach that combines engineering principles, microfabrication, advanced imaging, bioinformatics, and cutting-edge cell and molecular biology techniques, applied from the molecular to the organismal level.

The Lammerding laboratory is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Leducq Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, and private donations. More information is available at the Lammerding Lab website.