Cell scientist to watch - Celeste Nelson.

Celeste earned her first degrees in Biology and Chemical Engineering in 1998 at MIT. From there she moved to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine to pursue her PhD in Biomedical Engineering in Christopher Chen's laboratory. Before starting her own group at Princeton University in 2007, Celeste worked as a postdoctoral fellow in Mina Bissell's group in the Life Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Celeste's work has been recognised with multiple awards, including a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface, a Packard Foundation Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, the MIT Technology Review TR35 (Young Innovators under 35), the Allan P. Colburn Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and the Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. Working at the interface of cell biology, developmental biology and engineering, her laboratory investigates how biochemical and mechanical cues affect individual cells during organ morphogenesis and what happens when organs are destroyed in diseases such as cancer and fibrosis.