Robert Langer

Robert S. Langer, ScD, is a co-founder, member of PureTech’s R&D Committee and has served as a member of the board of directors since the Company’s founding. He has served as the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT since 2005. He is one of 12 institute professors, which is the highest honor that can be awarded to a faculty member at MIT. He served as a member of the FDA’s Science Board, the FDA’s highest advisory board, from 1995 to 2002 and as its chairman from 1999 to 2002. Dr Langer serves on the board of directors of Frequency Therapeutics, Inc., Abpro Korea, Alivio Therapeutics, Inc., Entrega, Inc. and Moderna, Inc. Dr Langer has written more than 1,500 articles. He also has over 1,350 issued and pending patents worldwide. Dr Langer’s patents have been licensed or sublicensed to over 400 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology and medical device companies. He is the most cited engineer in history (h-index 272 with over 300,000 citations according to Google Scholar).

Dr Langer has received over 220 major awards. He is one of four living individuals to have received both the 2006 United States National Medal of Science, the Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2002, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineers, and the 2012 Priestley Medal, the highest award of the American Chemical Society. He is also the only engineer to ever receive the Gairdner Foundation International Award. Dr Langer has received the Dickson Prize for Science, Heinz Award, the Harvey Prize, the John Fritz Award (given previously to inventors such as Thomas Edison and Orville Wright), the General Motors Kettering Prize for Cancer Research, the Dan David Prize in Materials Science, the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, the largest prize in the US for medical research, and the Lemelson-MIT prize, the world’s largest prize for invention, for being “one of history’s most prolific inventors in medicine.” In 2006, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. In 2015, Dr Langer received the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. He received his bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 1970 and his ScD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974, both in chemical engineering.