The American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and its Society for Biological Engineering (SBE) are honoring two of the bioengineering field’s leading researchers.
Dr. Douglas S. Clark, dean of the College of Chemistry and a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, has been named recipient of the SBE’s 2014 James E. Bailey Award for Biological Engineering. The award, which is sponsored by Cytos Biotechnology and named in honor of biotechnology pioneer Jay Bailey, will be given at the 2014 AIChE Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, where Clark will present the Bailey Award Lecture on Tuesday, November 18.
In his lecture entitled, “A Personal Perspective on Biotechnology’s Progress in a Golden Era (and How Jay Bailey Saw it Coming),” Clark — who was a student of Bailey’s at the California Institute of Technology in the 1980s — will discuss how the molecular biology approaches innovated in Bailey’s lab have formed the foundation for his own research, which encompasses biocatalysis, protein engineering, and cellular engineering for applications ranging from drug discovery to biofuels production.
Clark is co-director of Berkeley’s Synthetic Biology Institute and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He has published more than 230 articles, has 26 patents and patent applications, and is the co-author of a textbook on biochemical engineering. He serves as editor-in-chief of Biotechnology and Bioengineering, and is on the editorial boards of Enzyme and Microbial Technology and Extremophiles. Clark is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Institute of Medical and Biomedical Engineers. He received his PhD in chemical engineering from CalTech and holds a BS in chemistry from the University of Vermont.
At the November 18 Bailey Award ceremony and lecture, Michael Domach, editor of AIChE’s and SBE’s journal, Biotechnology Progress, will present the 2014 Biotechnology Progress Award for Excellence in Biological Engineering Publication to Dr. Ravi Kane, the P. K. Lashmet Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, New York. The Biotechnology Progress Award is sponsored by John Wiley & Sons, and recognizes outstanding contributions to the literature in the fields of biomedical engineering, biological engineering, biotechnology, biochemical engineering, and related areas.
Kane earned his PhD in chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and performed postdoctoral research at Harvard University before joining the RPI faculty in 2001. His research group works on the molecular engineering of biosurfaces and nanostructures, including research in molecular therapeutics and stem cells. He has produced more than 125 publications on these topics.
More information about the Society for Biological Engineering and its awards is available at www.aiche.org/SBE/community/awards.
About SBE:
Established in 2004, the Society for Biological Engineering is a technological community for engineers and applied scientists integrating biology with engineering. Members of SBE come from a broad spectrum of industries and disciplines and share in SBE’s mission of realizing the benefits of bioprocessing, biomedical and biomolecular applications. http://bio.aiche.org.
About AIChE:
AIChE is a professional society of nearly 45,000 chemical engineers in 100 countries. Its members work in corporations, universities and government using their knowledge of chemical processes to develop safe and useful products for the benefit of society.
Through its varied programs, AIChE continues to be a focal point for information exchange on the frontier of chemical engineering research in such areas as energy, sustainability, biological and environmental engineering, nanotechnology, and chemical plant safety and security. www.aiche.org.