Robert Langer

Bio

Dr. Langer is a co-founder and Senior Partner at PureTech Ventures. Dr. Langer is known for his groundbreaking discoveries in the fields of polymer chemistry, controlled drug delivery, and tissue engineering. He is one of 13 Institute Professors (the highest honor awarded to a faculty member) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Langer has written over 1000 articles and has more than 750 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 has received over 170 major awards, including the 2006 United States National Medal of Science, and the Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2002, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineers and the world’s most prestigious engineering prize. 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, Dr. 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) 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 a few people ever elected to all three United States National Academies and the youngest in history to ever receive this distinction. Discover Magazine (2002), Forbes Magazine (1999) and BioWorld (1990) have named Dr. Langer as one of the 25 most important individuals in biotechnology in the world. Forbes Magazine (2002) selected Dr. Langer as one of the 15 innovators world-wide 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 has served, at various times, on over 15 Boards of Directors and 30 Scientific Advisory Boards of such companies as Wyeth, Alkermes, Mitsubishi Pharmaceuticals, Warner-Lambert, Echo Therapeutics, Alseres Pharmaceuticals, and Momenta Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Langer has received honorary doctorates from Yale University, the ETH (Switzerland), the Technion (Israel), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), the Universite Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), the University of Liverpool (England), the University of Nottingham (England), Albany Medical College, the Pennsylvania State University, Northwestern University and Uppsala University (Sweden). He received his Bachelor’s Degree from Cornell University and his Sc.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in Chemical Engineering.