President

Cynthia Hajal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University. Her research interests are at the intersection of engineering and cancer biology, developing tissue engineered models of tumors to study cancer progression, drug delivery, and treatment resistance.

She received a BA in Economics and BS in Mechanical Engineering from Columbia University and her SM and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. Her doctoral work focused on the design of microfluidic models of the vasculature to investigate cancer metastasis and molecular transport between blood and tissues. Prior to joining Northeastern University, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT where she investigated resistance mechanisms to chemotherapies in patient-derived glioma tumor models using functional genomic screens. She was selected as a Rising Star in Mechanical Engineering by MIT (2021) and was a Ludwig Molecular Oncology Graduate Fellow (2018-2019). She graduated from College Notre Dame de Jamhour in 2011 and has been a member of the board of Jamhour Alumni US since 2013.