Nina Tandon

Nina Tandon is leading the charge of biology’s industrial revolution by overseeing the world’s first company growing living human bone for skeletal reconstruction. The benefits of this revolutionary stem cell technology, which has already been approved by the FDA for clinical trial on humans, include simplified surgery, improved bone formation, and shorter recovery times for patients. “Being able to use your own cells means you’re empowered to heal yourself as well,” says Tandon, who also co-authored Super Cells: Building with Biology, a book cataloguing the latest biotech inventions “using nature’s building block: the cell.” Tandon is working towards a possible world where we can create our own futures, using our own genes for our own health and healing purposes.

A TED Senior Fellow (she’s spoken at three different TED conferences) and Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Cooper Union, Tandon has a Master’s in Bioelectrical Engineering from MIT, a PhD in Biomedical Engineering, and an MBA from Columbia University. Her innovative PhD research focused on studying electrical signaling in the context of tissue engineering, and she has worked with cardiac, skin, bone, and neural tissue.

After completing her PhD, she consulted at McKinsey and Company. She is a senior fellow at the Lab for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering at Columbia, and currently serves as an adjunct professor of Electrical Engineering at Cooper Union. She has been published in Nature Protocols and Lab on a Chip, and featured on CNN, in WIRED (who also named her one of their innovation fellows), the Guardian, and more. Tandon was named a Global Thinker by Foreign Policy, one of Crain’s New York Business 40 Under 40, and a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer.