Erica Boles

Erica Ueda Boles is a co-founder and the Chief Scientific Officer of Lifespans Limited, a medical device startup company that spun out of the Department of Orthopaedics & Traumatology at HKU and Queen Mary Hospital in 2018. She obtained her B.S. from UCLA and M.S. from MIT in Mechanical Engineering. Her time at MIT includes research in the Tissue Engineering Laboratory on neural and mesenchymal stem cell differentiation in collagen scaffolds, and giving lectures and administering the Biomaterials–Tissue Interactions course. She worked at Abbot Vascular in Santa Clara, CA and at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Systems Biology in Boston before obtaining her Ph.D. from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany) in Chemistry & Biosciences. Her PhD research in the Biofunctional Materials Research Group focused on lab-on-a-chip technologies and high-density cell microarrays using superhydrophilic–superhydrophobic micropatterned surfaces. She did her postdoctoral work at the HKU Orthopaedic Research Center and went on to co-found Lifespans with another MIT engineer and orthopaedic surgeons from HKU Queen Mary Hospital to develop and commercialize novel orthopaedic devices, especially for the treatment of elderly patients with weak osteoporotic bone. Erica has authored several highly cited papers, been awarded large research and startup grants, and has granted and pending patents. She is active in the startup community and has won international startup pitch competitions.