Dr. Kam Leong Biography

Kam W. Leong holds the James B. Duke Professorship in Biomedical Engineering at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University, with a joint appointment in the Division of Experimental Surgery in the School of Medicine.

He was a faculty member in The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine from 1986 to 2005, and directed the Therapeutics and Tissue Engineering Laboratory at the Division of Johns Hopkins in Singapore from 1998-2005.

As the Director of Bioengineering Initiative at Duke University, he is leading a research initiative on applying nanotechnology to drug, gene and cell therapy. He also directs a lab on stem cell bioengineering in the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and his postdoctoral training at MIT. 

The research focus of his laboratory is on understanding and exploiting the interactions of cells with nanostructures for therapeutic applications. Discreet nanostructures in the form of multi-functional nanoparticles are applied to deliver drug, antigen, protein, siRNA, and DNA to cells for drug, gene and immunotherapy.

Continuous nanostructures in the form of nanofibers and nanopatterns are applied to scaffolding design to influence cellular response. He has published more than 180 peer-reviewed manuscripts and more than 30 patents. He is the recipient of the Young Investigator Research Achievement Award of the Controlled Release Society in 1994 and a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

He serves on the editorial board of Journal of Controlled Release, Biomaterials, Molecular Therapy, Acta Biomaterialia, Genetic Vaccines and Therapy, International Journal of Nanomedicine and Nanomedicine.