Dr. Liping Tang received his Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering from University of Minnesota. After completion of post-doctoral training at Albany Medical College, he became an Assistant Professor at the Department of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas. Currently, he is a Professor at the Department of Bioengineering at UTA. His research interest is to understand the mechanism of foreign body reactions. Using various in vivo imaging techniques, his group is actively working on the development of various imaging probes to monitor different processes and stages of foreign body reactions.

By applying the knowledge generated by these fundamental researches, his group is actively working on the development of bioactive materials and drug delivery nanomaterials which enhance tissue regeneration associated with a variety of diseases. As the results of these efforts, his group has recent discovered that biomaterial implants could prompt the recruitment and accumulation of a variety of progenitor cells, including mesenchymal stem cells. Using scaffolds to release a variety of chemokines and differentiation agents, his laboratory has developed the “Induced Regeneration via Autologous Stem Cell Regeneration (IRASC) technology which serves as the foundation of this proposed work.

His expertise covers a broad area of stem cells, tissue engineering, nanotechnology, biocompatibility, biomaterials, inflammation, infection and fibrosis. He has published many of his work in high impact journals, including Biomaterials, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Proceeding of National Academy of Science USA, Blood, Journal of Experimental Medicine, and Tissue Engineering. Many of his papers received high reference citations (11 papers with citation >100). His research is currently supported by funding from NIH and several medical device companies. He is the recipient of the Young Investigator Award from the Society for Biomaterials on 2001, Established Investigator Award from the National American Heart Association in 2003, and UTA College of Engineering Excellence in Research Award in 2010. He is recently elected as Fellow of the American Heart Association, Fellow of Biomaterials Science and Engineering and Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He also serves as an active member on several NIH study sections.

• 1992 - Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering (Chemical Engineering), University of Minnesota
• 1988 - M.S. in Marine Biology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
• 1986 - B.S. in Biology, Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan