Wong joined
Boston University as a
Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor in 1998, Faculty of the College of Engineering in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and later in the Division of Materials Science and Engineering. She is a faculty mentor in training programs in the College of Arts and Sciences and the
BU School of Medicine. She was promoted to Professor in 2013. Wong's research focuses on developing biomaterials for the early detection and treatment of disease. She is interested in understanding how the physical cellular environment determines cell behavior by developing substrata with features that can imitate
pathophysiological and
physiological environments. and later expanded to include metastatic cancer cells. Her recent research in this area has been focused on combining the understanding of factors that control cardiovascular cell behavior with micropatterned cell sheet technology to develop surgical solutions for paediatric patients with congenital heart defects. Wong has also developed microfluidic processing methods to create fibers of the biopolymer
silk and has recently been focusing on developing protein alloy fibers. Using tools developed to describe the silk's structure and drawing on her musical training, Wong enlisted composer John MacDonald (
Tufts University), who translated the structure of different silk protein fragment sequences into a series of musical compositions for flute. Wong's most recent work has been developing targeted ultrasound and magnetic resonance (MR)
contrast agents for the early detection of disease. Her MR contrast agent studies grew out of her work using nanotechnology to develop contrast agents to enhance oil recovery. She is currently conducting pre-clinical studies of targeted ultrasound contrast agents in collaboration with Nanovalent Pharmaceuticals to detect and treat surgical adhesions.
Academic service Wong served on the Executive Board of the
Biomedical Engineering Society from 2011 to 2014. In 2011, she served as the first woman Chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Biomaterials &
Tissue Engineering – a conference that began in 1966 as the Science and Technology of Biomaterials. An informal brainstorming session of women at this meeting led to a social media group formed by Laura Suggs (UT Austin) with the aim of creating a network to connect women faculty in Biomedical Engineering. Wong is the lead editor of
Biomaterials: Principles and Practices. She is on the editorial board of several journals and is Associate Editor (the Americas) for the journal Drug Delivery and Translational Research. In 2018 she was elected to the Council of the Tissue Engineering Regenerative Medicine International Society (TERMIS) - North America. At Boston University, Wong is the Inaugural Director of the Provost's Initiative to promote gender equality and inclusion in STEM at all levels: Advance, Recruit, Retain and Organize Women in STEM (ARROWS). The program advocates for women in STEM at all career stages, from early school education to
K–12 and academia. The idea was inspired by the
Athena SWAN program in the UK and the
National Science Foundation ADVANCE program.
Awards and honours • 2000
National Science Foundation CAREER Awards • 2009 Hartwell Individual Biomedical Engineering Award • 2009 Vice-Chair of Gordon Research Conference in Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering • 2009 Fellow of the
American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering*2011 Chair of Gordon Research Conference in Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering*2012
Boston University Collaborator of the Year Award • 2013 Fellow of the
Biomedical Engineering Society*2014
Boston University Inaugural Term Distinguished Professor of Engineering • 2017
Boston University Charles DeLisi Distinguished Lecture • 2017 Fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science • 2018
Boston University GWISE (Graduate Women in Science and Engineering) Advocate of the Year Award == References ==