Rebecca Zubajlo
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
rzubajlo@gmail.com
Bio
Rebecca Zubajlo is an NIH Harvard Kidney Urology Hematology Training Institute Postdoctoral Fellow working in the Edelman Lab in the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT. She earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in 2025 from MIT, where she was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Her doctoral research was at the intersection of sensing, signal processing, manufacturing, and bioengineering. As a doctoral candidate, Rebecca designed biofabrication systems and developed label-free analysis platforms for real-time monitoring of cellular and tissue mechanical and metabolic properties using optics and acoustics. Rebeccas current work explores metabolic dynamics of acute kidney injury in cardiogenic shock with mechanical circulatory support, integrating real-time sensing technologies and developing data processing pipelines for multimodal data sets.
Areas of Research
- Bioelectrical Engineering
Multimodal Platforms Integrating Sensing, Signal Processing, and Biofabrication for Mechanistic Insights into Disease
My research involves the integration of physical sensing, biological modeling, and data analytics to develop multimodal systems that advance diagnostics, therapeutics, biofabrication, and our understanding of cellular behavior. I design and build sensing platforms and data processing pipelines that reveal metabolic, mechanical, and structural properties of living systems, enabling new insights into disease processes. In my doctoral work, I developed a label-free multiphoton photoacoustic imaging system that visualizes cellular metabolism via intrinsic biomarkers. In parallel, I advanced acoustic microscopy techniques for mapping tissue mechanics and contributed to collaborations that integrate imaging with spatial proteomics and histology to uncover disease mechanisms. Currently, I am developing kidney model systems with integrated real-time sensing to study cellular responses under conditions mimicking cardiogenic shock and mechanical circulatory support. By uniting hardware innovation, signal processing, and bioengineering, my work provides new tools for dissecting disease processes and informs the design of next-generation diagnostic and therapeutic strategies.