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John Zimmerman

Assistant Professor

Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering

John Zimmerman
John Zimmerman

Biography

Dr. John Zimmerman joins the Meinig School faculty in the summer of 2025. His work focuses on the interface between living and non-living systems and building models for understanding the fundamental structure-function relationships of the body. This includes using both computational and tissue engineered approaches to recreate emergent tissue scale phenomenon, with a particular interest in the areas of  cardiac development, heart function, nanoparticle-cell interactions, and cardiomyopathies.

Dr. Zimmerman’s doctoral studies focused on synthesizing inorganic semiconductors for use in biological applications. This included developing mechanical models for engineering intracellular force probes,  as well as studying nanoparticle transport and endocytosis pathways. During his postdoctoral work at Harvard University in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, he focused on building tissue-engineered models of the heart. This involved developing mechanical and fluid-dynamic simulation software for studying how cardiac tissues deform in time and space and then building tissue-engineered systems to test these predictions. This work was further complemented by the use of machine-learning directed optimization approaches, which were used to model fitness landscapes. This provided insight into biological structure-function relationships, and how the structure of muscle tissues contributes to their mechanical function.

Research Interests

  • Biomechanics and Mechanobiology
  • Drug Delivery and Nanomedicine
  • Molecular and Cellular Engineering
  • Tissue Engineering and Biomaterials

Teaching Interests

  • Neural network design and implementation in biomedical applications
  • Biomaterial design and synthesis
  • Tissue biomechanics

Select Publications

  • J. F. Zimmerman, D. J. Drennan, J. Ikeda, Q. Jin, H. A. M. Ardoña, S. L. Kim, R. Ishii, K. K. Parker, Bioinspired design of a tissue-engineered ray with machine learning. Sci. Robot. 10, 1–12 (2025).

  • H. Chang, Q. Liu, J. F. Zimmerman, K. Y. Lee, Q. Jin, M. M. Peters, M. Rosnach, S. Choi, S. L. Kim, H. A. M. Ardoña, L. A. MacQueen, C. O. Chantre, S. E. Motta, E. M. Cordoves, K. K. Parker, Recreating the heart’s helical structure-function relationship with focused rotary jet spinning. Science (80-. ). 377, 180–185 (2022).

  • J. F. Zimmerman, R. Parameswaran, G. Murray, Y. Wang, M. Burke, B. Tian, Cellular uptake and dynamics of unlabeled freestanding silicon nanowires. Sci. Adv. 2, e1601039–e1601039 (2016).

  • Z. Al Tanoury, J. F. Zimmerman, J. Rao, D. Sieiro, H. M. McNamara, T. Cherrier, A. Rodríguez-delaRosa, A. Hick-Colin, F. Bousson, C. Fugier-Schmucker, F. Marchiano, B. Habermann, J. Chal, A. P. Nesmith, S. Gapon, E. Wagner, V. A. Gupta, R. Bassel-Duby, E. N. Olson, A. E. Cohen, K. K. Parker, O. Pourquié, Prednisolone rescues Duchenne muscular dystrophy phenotypes in human pluripotent stem cell–derived skeletal muscle in vitro. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 118, e2022960118 (2021).

  • J. F. Zimmerman, G. F. Murray, Y. Wang, J. M. Jumper, J. R. Austin, B. Tian, Free-Standing Kinked Silicon Nanowires for Probing Inter- and Intracellular Force Dynamics. Nano Lett. 15, 5492–5498 (2015).

John Zimmerman on Google Scholar

Select Awards and Honors

  • NIH NRSA T32 Fellowship: Boston Children’s Hospital Cardiology Training Program 2022-2023
  • NIH NRSA T32 Fellowship: Organ Design and Engineering Training (ODET) Program 2017-2019
  • Biomedical Consortium Scholar 2014-2016

Education

  • B.A., Chemistry, Whitman College 2011
  • Ph.D., Chemistry, University of Chicago 2016
  • Postdoc, Cardiac Tissue Engineering, Disease Biophysics Group, Harvard University 2025