Robert S. Langer - Biography

Robert S. Langer (born August 29, 1948 in Albany, New York) is an American engineer and the David H. Koch Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was formerly the Germeshausen Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering and maintains activity in the department of chemical engineering and the department of biological engineering at MIT. He is also a faculty member of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. He is a widely recognized and cited researcher in biotechnology, especially in the fields of drug delivery systems and tissue engineering.Langer's research laboratory at MIT is the largest biomedical engineering lab in the world, maintaining about $10 million in annual grants and over 100 researchers. He was awarded the 2012 Priestley Medal.

Langer is widely regarded for his contributions to medicine and the emerging fields of biotechnology. He is considered a pioneer of many new technologies, including transdermal delivery systems, which allow the administration of drugs or extraction of analytes from the body through the skin without needles or other invasive methods. He and the researchers in his lab have also made advances in tissue engineering, such as the creation of engineered blood vessels and vascularized engineered muscle tissue.

Langer is a prolific inventor and holds more than 760 granted or pending patents He has also authored more than 1,100 scientific papers and has participated in the founding of multiple technology companies. He has received numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science, the 10th Annual Heinz Award in the category of Technology, the Economy and Employment, the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the Lemelson-MIT Prize, the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research and the Millennium Technology Prize in 2008. Langer is also the youngest person in history (at 43) to be elected to all three American science academies: the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine.

Langer received his bachelor's degree from Cornell University in chemical engineering. He earned his Sc.D. in chemical engineering from MIT in 1974. His dissertation was entitled "Enzymatic regeneration of ATP" and completed under the direction of Clark K. Colton. From 1974–1977 he worked as a postdoctoral fellow for cancer researcher Judah Folkman at the Children's Hospital Boston and at Harvard Medical School.

Robert Langer and his wife, Laura, a fellow MIT graduate, have three children.

Langer has honorary degrees from a number of universities from around the world: Harvard University, the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, Yale University, the ETH (Switzerland), the Technion (Israel), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), the Universite Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Willamette University, the University of Liverpool (England), the University of Nottingham (England), Albany Medical College, Pennsylvania State University, Northwestern University, Uppsala University (Sweden) and the University of California – San Francisco Medal. He received the prestigious Dan David Prize in 2005.

Recognition

• In 2008 he was awarded Finland's Millennium Technology Prize for developing innovative biomaterials for controlled drug release.
• In 2011 he was awarded The Economist's Innovation award in the category of bioscience for his proven successes in drug-delivery and tissue engineering.

• Robert S. Langer fact sheet at MIT News Office

External links

• Langer Lab: Professor Robert Langer
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• Dan David Prize Laureate 2005
• Langer Lab Web Page
• BBC News
• Controlled Release Technology Prof. Langer's 5-day short course offered in July.