Natalie Artzi is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a Principal Research Scientist at MIT. During her PhD at the department of Chemical Engineering at the Technion, Israel, she studied the relationships between structure, properties and performance of materials as related to polymeric nanocomposite systems. As a postdoctoral associate at the Edelman lab, Dr. Artzi worked on the design of smart adhesive materials that are used to seal suture line after internal surgeries, able to sense their environment and react in a graded manner with different target tissues to induce healing and reduce complications associated with leakage. Prof. Artzi’s group integrates synergistically chemistry, materials science, imaging and biology to study the general principles by which materials respond to their environment and interact with tissues. Rational design of complex dynamic materials that serve as a harbor for drugs or cells, are used to modulate embedded drug release kinetics, or seeded cells’ phenotype to achieve desired clinical outcome in inflammatory and neoplastic diseases. Rational and predictive design enables the formation of new therapeutic materials with determinable clinical outcome.