Dr. Bryan D. James is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University (Jan. 2025). He leads the EcoBioMaterials Design Lab focused on creating functional, sustainable, and benign materials for a safer, cleaner future by innovating at each stage of engineering design process. He actively collaborates globally with academic colleagues, NGOs, and industrial partners, regularly engages with K-12 students and educators, and advises policymakers. Bryan has been recognized with multiple honors and awards, including being a recipient of a Sustainable Futures Initiative Early Career Postdoctoral-Faculty Bridge Grant, and being named a Rising Star in Engineering in Health, a CAS Future Leader, and an ACS PMSE Future Faculty Scholar.

Bryan was a Postdoctoral Scholar/Investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), working with Mark Hahn, Collin Ward, and Chris Reddy. His postdoctoral research focused on understanding the fate, persistence, and toxicity of plastic in the ocean to inform the rational design of next-generation materials that are safe for people and the planet. Bryan received his B.A.Sc. in materials engineering from the University of Toronto in 2017 and his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the University of Florida (UF) in 2021. At UF, as an NIH F31 Predoctoral Fellow under the mentorship of Josephine Allen, Bryan pioneered the use of nucleic acid-collagen complexes for hard and soft tissue engineering and championed investigating sex as a biological variable in biomaterials research, identifying mechanobiological sex differences in vascular cells.