Kevin Costa

Prof. Costa is one of the scientific co-founders of Novoheart, and has served as the CSO since 2017. He is Director of Cardiovascular Cell and Tissue Engineering at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, and was previously trained at the Johns Hopkins University and on the faculty as Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University. As a "blue-blood" biomedical engineering (BME) expert (B.S. and M.S. in BME from Boston University, Ph.D. in BME from UC San Diego, and postdocs in BME from JHU and Washington University) in cell and tissue biomechanics and cardiac tissue engineering, he has developed one of the first engineered cardiac tissue systems and is an inventor of several cardiac tissue engineering technologies. Since 2009, he has been working with Prof. Ronald Li to translate such systems into human cells. Prof. Costa has received research funding from the Whitaker Foundation, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH; NHLBI, NIBIB, and NIGMS). He was also a recipient of the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the NSF.