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Director, MSK Discovery Center
Spaulding Rehab Hospital, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Fabrisia Ambrosio is the Atlantic Charter Director of the Discovery Center for Musculoskeletal Recovery at the Schoen Adams Research Institute and Associate Professor in the Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School. Her research aims to improve tissue healing and functional recovery by bridging physiology and physics across scales—from sub-atomic interactions to organismal function. She has been credited with founding the field of Regenerative Rehabilitation, which integrates rehabilitative strategies with regenerative medicine to enhance tissue regeneration. This paradigm has been applied to models including skeletal muscle, osteoarthritis, stroke, and spinal cord injury, and was recognized by the NIH as a strategic research priority to advance rehabilitation research. In 2022, she was inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering College of Fellows “for outstanding contributions to the field of Regenerative Rehabilitation, integrating applied biophysics and cellular therapeutics to optimize tissue function.”
Dr. Ambrosio’s lab leverages diverse biophysical approaches to interrogate cell and tissue behavior—applying machine learning to decode extracellular vesicle signatures, mathematical modeling to optimize therapeutic delivery, and Information Theory to track transcriptional entropy. Building on these methods, her team is advancing understanding of female aging, with particular emphasis on menopause-associated musculoskeletal decline. Most recently, she has expanded her investigations into quantum biology, exploring how quantum phenomena may guide stem cell behavior. Her NIH-funded portfolio exceeds $30M, and, collectively, her body of work has earned “Best Paper of the Year” awards, multiple patent applications, and broad media attention in outlets including Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and The Scientist.
