Scientific Advisory Board

• Daniel Anderson, Ph.D.
• Alan Colman, Ph.D.
• Hongkui Deng, Ph.D.
• Sheng Ding, Ph.D.
• Rudolf Jaenisch, M.D.
• Jeffrey Karp, Ph.D.
• Robert Langer, Sc.D.
• Douglas A. Melton, Ph.D.
• Roy Ogle, Ph.D.
• Thomas Roberts, Ph.D.
• Lee Rubin, Ph.D.
• Bob Weinberg, Ph.D.
• Leonard Zon, M.D.

Robert Langer, Sc.D.

Biodegradable, biocompatible engineered materials and polymeric delivery systems

Institute Professor at MIT, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology

Dr. Langer received his Bachelor's Degree from Cornell University in 1970 and his Sc.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974, both in Chemical Engineering.He is one of 13 Institute Professors (the highest honor awarded to a faculty member) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has written over 950 articles and has more than 600 issued or pending patents worldwide, one of which was cited as the outstanding patent in Massachusetts in 1988 and one of 20 outstanding patents in the United States.

Dr. Langer's patents have been licensed or sublicensed to over 200 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology and medical device companies; a number of these companies were launched on the basis of these patent licenses. He served as a member of the United States Food and Drug Administration's SCIENCE Board, the FDA's highest advisory board, from 1995-2002, and as Chairman from 1999-2002.

His work is at the interface of biotechnology and materials science. A major focus is the study and development of polymers to deliver drugs, particularly genetically engineered proteins, DNA and RNAi, continuously at controlled rates for prolonged periods of time.

Dr. Langer has received over 150 major awards. In 2007, he received the 2006 United States National Medal of Science. In 2002, he received the Charles Stark Draper Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineers and the world's most prestigious engineering prize, from the National Academy of Engineering. He is also the only engineer to receive the Gairdner Foundation International Award; 68 recipients of this award have subsequently received a Nobel Prize.

Among numerous other awards Langer has received are the Dickson Prize for Science (2002), Heinz Award for Technology, Economy and Employment (2003), the Harvey Prize (2003), the John Fritz Award (2003) (given previously to inventors such as Thomas Edison and Orville Wright), the General Motors Kettering Prize for Cancer Research (2004), the Dan David Prize in Materials Science (2005), the Max Planck Research Award (2008), the Millenium Technology Prize (2008) and the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research (2005), the largest prize in the U.S. for medical research. In 2006, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

In 1998, he received the Lemelson-MIT prize, the world's largest prize for invention for being "one of history's most prolific inventors in medicine." In 1989 Dr. Langer was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1992 he was elected to both the National Academy of Engineering and to the National Academy of Sciences. He is one of very few people ever elected to all three United States National Academies and the youngest in history (at age 43) to ever receive this distinction.