George Georgiou

George Georgiou is the Dula D. Cockrell Centennial Chair Professor at UT Austin, where he has served on the faculty continuously since 1986 and currently holds appointments in the Departments of Chemical Engineering, Molecular Biosciences and Biomedical Engineering. He received his B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Manchester, UK, and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and in Molecular Biology from Cornell in 1987. For the first 20 years of his career, he worked on the biogenesis of secreted protein in bacteria and on protein engineering technologies but starting in 2007, he switched his research to human immunology and to the discovery & preclinical development of protein therapeutics. Since then he co-invented and led the early development of 4 protein therapeutics (one approved, three in clinical development), invented methods for the molecular-level analysis of the composition of human serological antibody repertoire demonstrating among others that the antibody response to infection or vaccination has very restricted clonality and separately, made multiple contributions to antibody effector function biology and Fc engineering. He has published >280 research papers and is co-inventor of >170 issued and pending US patents resulting in 28 distinct IP suites that have so far been licensed to 31 pharma & biotech companies. He founded and was president of one company acquired by Maxygen in 2001 and later founded, secured Series A funding, and served as Director of two biotech companies that are currently NSDQ listed.

His contributions have been recognized by multiple awards including the Amgen award in Biochemical Engineering in 2007, his selection as one of "the top 100 eminent chemical engineers of the modern era" by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (2008), and as a "top 20 translational researcher" by Nature Biotechnology in 2013. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering (since 2005), the National Academy of Medicine (2011), the National Academy of Inventors (2015), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2015).