When Bioengineer, Jeff Karp, was a kid growing up in the countryside near Peterborough, Ontario, he knew very little about engineering. He lived with his family in a house designed by famed Canadian architect Frank Gehry surrounded by farms and forests.  The property included a creek where Karp would watch snapping turtles lay their eggs, not realizing these early encounters with nature would play a part in his success in the medical field.

Of course, Karp had no idea what his future held for him. “ I thought an engineer was the guy with the blue striped cap who drove the little train around the local zoo,” Karp laughs from his lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital(BWH) in Boston, Massachusetts.

The Karp lab is where it all happens. Karp and his multidisciplinary team are at the forefront of regenerative medicine, focusing on stem cell therapeutics, drug delivery systems, and tissue adhesives- many of these approaches are inspired by nature. Known as a bioinspirationalist, Karp sees nature as a tool to help solve medical problems. “I look at nature with a purpose,” he says. “A lot of technologies we’ve developed have been influenced by nature.”