THE PI

Principle Investigator

Prof. Monica L. Ohnsorg is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She leads an interdisciplinary research lab conducting science at the interface of polymer chemistry, biomaterials, and extracellular matrix engineering.

She completed her training as a postdoctoral fellow in 2025 in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, working in the lab of Prof. Kristi S. Anseth. There, with support from an NSF T32 “Interdisciplinary Training in Musculoskeletal Research,” she used nonlinear elastic biomaterials to study how strain-stiffening extracellular microenvironments influence the morphology, mechanotransduction, and differentiation of human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stromal cells.

In 2021, she earned her PhD from the University of Minnesota where she was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Department of Chemistry co-advised by Profs. Theresa M. Reineke and Frank S. Bates. Her graduate work, focused on synthesizing and designing polymer excipients to improve oral drug delivery, was awarded the Eastman Chemical Student Award in Applied Polymer Science. Monica completed her ACS Certified B.S. in Chemistry with minors in Engineering and Math at Hope College in 2016.