BME Professor Marsha Rolle to Speak at Women in Bioscience Event

This year, the annual BioConnects New England & Women in Bioscience event will be held in collaboration with The Roux institute to celebrate both women in bioscience and Maine’s growing life sciences ecosystem on Tuesday, June 7, 2022 from 4-7 pm.  Professor Rolle will present as part of the Women in Bioscience Panel Discussion.

The event will feature an overview of BioConnects New England coalition and a moderated panel discussion of acclaimed female scientists and professionals focusing success stories and challenges, along with practical concepts to advance women in the bioscience industry. The panel will be followed by a networking reception with a cash bar available and light appetizers included on us.

BioConnects New England is harnessing the resources and talent across New England to advance the biotech industry, expand and localize biomanufacturing, and provide economic opportunities and pathways to the community, focusing particularly on economically disadvantaged areas, women, and marginalized populations.

Marsha Rolle, Ph.D. is a professor of biomedical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, MA, and co-director of the Cell Engineering Research Equipment Suite (CERES@WPI), developed with the MBI biotech incubator and funded by the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center. She represents WPI as a co-lead of BioConnects New England, a tri-state coalition focused on growing a more sustainable, equitable biotechnology industry. She is passionate about commercial translation of biomedical technologies and cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset in her students. A native New Englander, she grew up in Freeport, Maine and earned her B.S. degree in Biochemistry from Brown University in Providence, RI. After graduation, she joined Sulzer Innotec (Austin, TX), a subsidiary of SulzerMedica, to develop drug delivery technologies for medical devices. She later earned a PhD in Bioengineering at the University of Washington, and postdoctoral training at the Benaroya Research Institute in Seattle. Since joining the WPI faculty in 2007, she published over 40 peer-reviewed articles with her students and collaborators in the fields of tissue engineering, regenerative medicine and biomaterials, and holds 4 issued U.S. patents. Her work has been funded by DAAD (faculty fellowship to Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart, Germany), National Institutes of Health (R15, R01), National Science Foundation (REU, IGERT, STTR Phase I and II), and Manufacturing USA Institutes.