Robert Langer

Robert Langer is an Institute Professor at MIT (there are 13 Institute Professors at MIT; an Institute Professor is the highest honor awarded to a faculty member). His h-index of 232 is the highest of any engineer in history. He has over 1,130 issued and pending patents which have been licensed or sublicensed to over 300 companies. He served as Chairman of the FDA’s SCIENCE BOARD (highest advisory board) from 1999-2002. Langer is one of a very few individuals elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors. He is one of four living individuals to receive both the US National Medal of Science and the US National Medal of Technology and Innovation. In 2015, Dr. Langer received the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. He has also received the Draper Prize (considered the engineering Nobel Prize), Albany Medical Center Prize, Wolf Prize for Chemistry, Millennium Technology Prize, Priestley Medal (highest award of the American Chemical Society), Gairdner Prize, Kyoto Prize and the Lemelson-MIT prize, for being “one of history’s most prolific inventors in medicine.” He holds 29 honorary doctorates including honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale.