Randolph Ashton

Randolph S. Ashton was born in Philadelphia, PA and raised in Richmond, VA. After graduating from the Thomas Jefferson Governor’s School for Government and International Studies, he received his BS from Hampton University (Hampton, Virginia, 2002) and PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY, 2007) in Chemical Engineering. During graduate school, he researched how to engineer biomaterials at the nanoscale to regulate the fate of adult neural stem cells. He continued to pursue his interest in stems cells and tissue engineering as a California Institute for Regenerative Medicine and a NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California Berkeley’s Stem Cell Center. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Principle Investigator of the Stem Cell Bioprocessing and Regenerative Biomaterials laboratory at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. Dr. Ashton’s lab develops novel tissue engineering methodologies to derive brain and spinal cord tissues from human pluripotent stem cells, which can be used to create groundbreaking regenerative therapies and models of neurological disorders.