Erika Cyphert
University of California San Diego
Assistant Professor of Bioengineering
Dr. Cyphert earned her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering in 2020 from Case Western Reserve University. For her graduate research, she was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP) and received the PhD Student Award for Outstanding Research from the Society for Biomaterials. During her graduate work she spent time as an international visiting researcher as a Fulbright Scholar at the Warsaw University of Technology (Poland) and Whitaker Foundation Grantee at Tokyo Women’s Medical University (Japan). Her graduate work focused on developing polymeric delivery systems for treatment of orthopaedic implant infection and cancer. Dr. Cyphert then joined the Sibley School of Mechanical Engineering at Cornell University as a postdoctoral fellow and was awarded an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Individual National Research Service Award (NRSA F32) through the National Institute on Aging. The second half of her postdoctoral fellowship was spent in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at UC San Francisco. Her postdoctoral work focused on studying associations between the gut microbiome and musculoskeletal tissue health in the context of aging. In July 2024, Dr. Cyphert joined the Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering at UC San Diego. Her lab focuses on the development of drug delivery systems that target the microbiome with applications in women’s health, infectious disease, and cancer.