Maria Gencoglu

Biography

I was born and raised in Bogota, Colombia. I obtained my BS degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Los Andes. I came to the States in 2010 to pursue higher education. I obtained my PhD degree in 2014 from the Chemical Engineering Department at Michigan Tech. I continued my journey in academia at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and I worked as a postdoc from 2015-2018. I was an assistant Professor of Practice in University of the Pacific’s Department of Bioengineering from 2020-2021. In June 2021, I joined the Clinical Diagnostics Group in Bio-Rad Laboratories, where I worked on developing molecular diagnostics products using PCR technologies. I joined the Chemical Engineering Department in Michigan Tech as an Assistant Professor in August 2024. My research interests include cancer tissue engineering, scaffold-based disease modeling, molecular mechanisms of diseases, and 3D organoids and spheroids models