Christian Morrill

College of Engineering

A Cache Valley native, Christian is the sixth in his immediate family to attend Utah State University and engage in undergraduate research. Electing to double major in biological engineering and biochemistry, Christian hopes that both these unique perspectives will assist him in developing future medical treatments as a physician-researcher. Starting as an open-laboratory project, Christian was encouraged to pursue an expressed interest in organ engineering. Unable, however, to find an organ engineering laboratory at USU, Christian began working for Dr. John Morrey in March 2015 at the Institute for Antiviral Research (IAR) studying Hepatitis B, West Nile, and Zika viruses. Building on his experience at the IAR, Christian was selected for a highly competitive internship at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine and began working on kidney/pancreas engineering projects and the associated transplantation science. Since then, Christian has coauthored multiple chapters in “Kidney Transplantation, Bioengineering and Regeneration”, an all-inclusive text for transplant surgeons and bioengineers. He is also coauthored on a recent review of neural engineering applications and acknowledged for his contributions in multiple publications from the IAR. Christian continues to study neural tissue engineering with USU’s Dr. Yu Huang and looks forward to starting medical school this summer.