2010 Commencement remarks by Robert S. Langer, the Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a renowned biotechnology pioneer and prolific inventor. (Video: 3 min., 46 sec.)
ROBERT S. LANGER, SC.D. Honorary Doctor of Engineering
Robert S. Langer, the Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is a renowned biotechnology pioneer and prolific inventor. His research laboratory at MIT, which has been called the largest biomedical engineering lab in the world, is responsible for key advances in the administration of drugs through the skin without needles or other invasive methods, and important tissue engineering breakthroughs.
Dr. Langer is the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT. He has written approximately 1,050 articles. Dr. Langer also has approximately 750 issued and pending patents worldwide. Dr. Langer’s patents have been licensed or sublicensed to more than 220 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology and medical device companies. He is the most cited engineer in history.
Dr. Langer 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 its chairman from 1999-2002.
Dr. Langer has received over 170 major awards including the 2006 United States National Medal of Science; the Charles Stark Draper Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineers; and the 2008 Millennium Prize, the world’s largest technology prize. He is also the only engineer to receive the Gairdner Foundation International Award. Among numerous other awards, Langer has received the Dickson Prize for Science (2002) and the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research (2005). 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.
Forbes Magazine (1999) and Bio World (1990) have named Dr. Langer as one of the 25 most important individuals in biotechnology in the world. Discover Magazine (2002) named him as one of the 20 most important people in this area. Forbes Magazine (2002) selected Dr. Langer as one of the 15 innovators worldwide who will reinvent our future. Time Magazine and CNN (2001) named Dr. Langer as one of the 100 most important people in America and one of the 18 top people in science or medicine in America.
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.
