B.S., Production Engineering, Anna University, Chennai, India, 2013

M.S., Industrial and Systems Engineering, North Carolina State University, 2017

Ph.D., Industrial and Systems Engineering, North Carolina State University, 2019

Lokesh Karthik Narayanan received his B.S in Production Engineering at Madras Institute of Technology, in 2013. Shortly after, he joined the graduate program in Industrial Engineering at the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, NC State, and received his en route M.S. in Industrial Engineering with a thesis in the area of additive manufacturing for tissue engineering in 2017 and his Ph.D. in the area of quality monitoring of biomanufacturing processes including 3D Bioprinting in 2019. Outside academia he has prior work experiences in automotive manufacturing, design and event management industry.

As a researcher Dr. Narayanan’s research interests centers on development of scalable 3D biofabrication processes that enable manufacturing of engineered tissues. Through his research, he is addressing the issues that hinder the translation of processes to the industry such as scalability and quality control. His latest research investigates the use of impedance sensing to monitor the biological quality characteristics of engineered tissue. His vision is to model the process function relationships and engineer semi-autonomous cyber-physical systems for tissue and biomedical device manufacturing.

Dr. Narayanan has served as the instructor for core manufacturing and design courses at NC State and will be teaching CAD/CAM (IME 380) and automation (IME 482) at NDSU starting Fall 2019. He is a member of the Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE), Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) and is a member of student relations committee in the national chapter of SME.

Research Interests:

• Additive manufacturing for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine
• Biomedical product and process engineering and development
• Cyber physical systems engineering for biomedical product manufacturing
• Clinical/commercial translation of biomedical products

Selected Publications:

1. Narayanan, L. K., Thompson, T. L., Shirwaiker, R. A., and Starly, B. (2018) Label free process monitoring of 3D bioprinted engineered constructs via dielectric impedance spectroscopy. Biofabrication, 10(3): 35012. http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1758-5090/aaccbf/meta
2. Chansoria, P., Narayanan, L. K., Shirwaiker, R. A. Ultrasound-assisted biofabrication and bioprinting of preferentially aligned three-dimensional cellular constructs. Biofabrication 2019; 11:035015.  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1758-5090/ab15cf/meta
3. Narayanan, L. K., Huebner, P., Fisher, M., Spang, J., Starly, B., Shirwaiker, R. A. (2016) 3D-Bioprinting of Polylactic Acid (PLA) Nanofiber–Alginate Hydrogel Bioink Containing Human Adipose-Derived Stem Cells. ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering 2 (10): 1732-1742. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsbiomaterials.6b00196