Arup Chakraborty

Arup Chakraborty is one of 21 individuals who are members of all three branches of the US National Academies. His career has been focused on work that brings together approaches from different disciplines to understand diverse phenomena and harness that knowledge toward practical ends. He is currently the Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering, and Professor of Physics, and Chemistry at MIT, having joined the school in 2005. He served as the founding Director of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science from February 2012 to January 2018. He is also a founding steering committee member of the Ragon Institute of MIT, MGH, and Harvard, and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard.

After an early career in guiding the engineering of polymers and catalysts using quantum mechanical calculations, since 2000, Chakraborty’s work has largely focused on bringing together immunology and the physical and engineering sciences. Since 2016, he has also been interested in the role of phase separation in gene regulation. Chakraborty was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering for completely different bodies of work, as well as the National Academy of Medicine. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and serves on the US Defense Science Board. After obtaining his Ph.D. in chemical engineering and postdoctoral studies, he joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in December 1988.