Dr. Idit Goldfracht is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Columbia University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering in New York City. She completed her Ph.D. as part of the direct Ph.D. program in the Biotechnology Interdisciplinary Unit at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, under the supervision of Professor Lior Gepstein. In her research, she developed a novel platform for the study of cardiovascular diseases by combining the use of stem cells and tissue engineering techniques.
During her Ph.D. studies, she completed an internship in Professor Gordon Keller's lab at the University of Toronto, where she concentrated on differentiating human stem cells into chamber-specific cardiomyocytes. She then implemented this method and demonstrated that atrial and ventricular engineered tissues can recapitulate aspects of the human heart. Following the completion of her Ph.D., Idit joined Prof. Shulamit Levenberg's lab at the Technion, where she conducted postdoctoral research centered around 3D printing of
vascularized tissues for regenerative medicine purposes.
In 2023, she joined the lab of Prof. Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic where she is currently
focusing on the development of functional vascularized cardiac tissue for modeling
cardiovascular diseases.