Catherine R. von Reyn, PhD
Catherine R. von Reyn, PhD, is an associate professor in BIOMED, where she has built an impressive research and teaching career since joining Drexel in 2016. She also holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the Drexel University College of Medicine. She leads the Neural Circuit Engineering Lab at Drexel. Her lab applies engineering principles to understand how the nervous system computes information at the level of individual neurons and networks and seeks to identify molecular mechanisms behind altered computations in neurodevelopmental disorders.
Her work has been supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Margaret Q. Landenberger Foundation, the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation and the Pennsylvania Department of Health, and published in journals including Nature, Neuron, Current Biology and eLife.
Dr. von Reyn earned her bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and her PhD in bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania, where her research examined how mechanical force on the brain during traumatic injury activates neurodegenerative and neuroprotective chemical signaling pathways. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus, studying how the brain encodes and uses sensory information to guide behavior.
Beyond the lab, Dr. von Reyn has been a committed builder of access in STEM. She serves as a liaison for Engineering for US All (e4USA), a national program that introduces engineering design principles to high school students, and developed low-cost, mobile phone-based devices that allow high school students to perform neuroengineering experiments otherwise reliant on high-end research equipment. Through partnerships with the Overbrook School for the Blind in Pennsylvania and the Governor Morehead School for the Blind in North Carolina, she has led BIOMED senior design students to design assistive devices for math and science curricula. She also serves as faculty chair of Drexel Cell Imaging Center, a research core facility providing the Drexel research community with state-of-the-art resources for quantitative light microscopy.