Brian Timko graduated from Lehigh University with B.S. degrees in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, and from Harvard University with a Ph.D. in Chemistry. He completed his graduate studies in the laboratory of Professor Charles Lieber at Harvard, where he studied semiconductor nanowires and how they could be stably interfaced with living cells and tissue. He completed postdoctoral studies with Professor Robert Langer at MIT and Professor Daniel Kohane at Boston Children's Hospital. During that time, Timko studied nanocomposite materials for cardiac tissue engineering and remotely-triggered drug delivery, and subsequently, he was an instructor in anaesthesiology at Boston Children's Hospital. In 2016, he joined Tufts School of Engineering as an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.