Amir Vahabikashi

Dr. Amir Vahabikashi is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Northeastern University in Boston, where he leads a laboratory at the intersection of tissue engineering, soft bioelectronics, and mechanobiology. He earned his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University, where his doctoral research uncovered how the mechanical properties of outflow tissue and Schlemm’s canal contribute to elevated intraocular pressure in glaucoma, and completed postdoctoral training at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine and the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics, where he developed flexible bioelectronic devices for studying the biology of living tissues and organoids.

His research has been recognized by the National Eye Institute with a Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00), by the National Cancer Institute with a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award for his work on the role of the cytoskeleton in cancer cell mechanics, and by the National Science Foundation with an Innovation Corps Award. Dr. Vahabikashi has a long-standing commitment to understanding and treating blinding diseases of the eye, with research spanning glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration. His laboratory builds miniature human organ-on-a-chip platforms that recreate the complexity of living tissue to uncover disease mechanisms and accelerate the development of new treatments.

He serves on the editorial boards of Nature Biological Physics and Mechanics and Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, and is deeply committed to training the next generation of scientists, mentoring a diverse group of doctoral, master’s, and undergraduate students at Northeastern. His BrightFocus-funded project aims to build the first fully human, integrated retina-on-a-chip model to study how age-related macular degeneration damages the retina and to identify new therapies that can preserve and protect vision.