Valerie M. Weaver is a professor and the director of the Center for Bioengineering and Tissue Regeneration in the department of surgery and co-director Bay Area Center for Physical Sciences and Oncology at the University of California San Francisco (USA).
She was the first woman to receive the Shu Chien Award from the Biomedical Engineering Society in 2022, which honours contributions in the cellular and molecular bioengineering field.
After that, she did postdoctoral training at the National Research Council of Canada for two years, followed by another 5-year postdoctoral at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California Berkeley with Mina J Bissell in cancer cell biology.
[1][2] In 1999, Weaver became an assistant professor in the department of pathology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she continued studying breast cancer and tissue architecture using organotypic models.
During this period and in collaboration with scientists from the Institute for Medicine and Engineering, Weaver published a breakthrough discovery on breast tumour behaviour induction by demonstrating how integrin signalling modification by tissue tension disrupts the morphogenesis of breast tissue.