Prof Kris Kilian is Director of the Laboratory for Advanced Biomaterials & Matrix Engineering (LAB&ME) with a joint position across the School of Chemistry and the School of Materials Science & Engineering in the Faculty of Science, UNSW Sydney. He is co-Director of the Australian Centre for NanoMedicine (ACN) and a member of the Adult Cancer Program in the Prince of Wales Clinical School. He worked for Merck Research Labs in the Methods Development group from 2000-2004 before travelling to Sydney, Australia to do his PhD at the University of New South Wales. In 2007, Kris joined the laboratory of Milan Mrksich at the University of Chicago as a NIH postdoctoral fellow to investigate new methods for directing the differentiation of stem cells. He was Assistant Professor (2011-2017) and Associate Professor (2017-2018) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and the Department of Bioengineering, before returning to UNSW in 2018 as a Scientia Fellow between the School of Chemistry and the School of Materials Science and Engineering. Kris is a recipient of the Cornforth Medal from the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (2008), the NIH Ruth L. Kirchstein National Research Service Award (2008), a Kavli Fellow of the 19th German-American Frontiers of Science (2014), the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award (2015), a Young Innovator of Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering (2017), the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (2018), the Dean's Award for Research Excellence (2020) and a Eureka Prize finalist for Innovative Use of Technology (2023). His research interests include the design and development of model extracellular matrices and dynamic hydrogels for cell and tissue engineering, and fundamental studies in cell plasticity.

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