» Langer to give Caspi Lecture on May 21
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Langer to give Caspi Lecture on May 21

Talk will cover the development of tissue engineering

By Mark Shelton
UMass Medical School Communications
May 15, 2012

 langer-robert-caspi-lecture
 Robert S. Langer, ScD
  
Robert S. Langer, ScD, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will give the fifth Eliahu Caspi Lecture in Chemical Biology on Monday, May 21, at noon in the Arthur and Martha Pappas Amphitheatre (Amphitheatre 1) on the UMMS Worcester campus. Dr. Langer’s talk will cover the development of tissue engineering, “From the Discovery of the First Angiogenesis Inhibitors to the Development of Controlled Drug Delivery Systems and the Foundation of Tissue Engineering.”

Langer’s visit is hosted by Thoru Pederson, PhD, the Vitold Arnett Professor of Cell Biology and professor of biochemistry & molecular pharmacology, and is sponsored by the UMMS Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Pharmacology. The lecture honors Eliahu Caspi, a principal scientist emeritus of the Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research who made a number of discoveries relevant to the mechanisms of synthesis of steroid hormones. His family established the lectureship in his memory.

Langer has received more than 200 major awards for his research and development in the field of biomedical engineering, including the 2006 United States National Medal of Science; the Charles Stark Draper Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineers; the 2008 Millennium Prize (the world’s largest technology prize); and the 2012 Priestley Medal, the highest award of the American Chemical Society. He is the also the only engineer to receive the Gairdner Foundation International Award.

Langer received his bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 1970 and his ScD from the MIT in 1974, both in chemical engineering; he has since received honorary degrees from, among others, Harvard University, the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, Yale University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Universite Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Liverpool (England) and Northwestern University. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences.