The Campaign for Boston University was momentous news for our research community, supplying us greater means and flexibility to expand the scope of our research agenda.
Christopher Chen, director of the Biological Design Center and a professor of biomedical engineering and of materials science and engineering, received the 2019 Robert A. Pritzker Distinguished Lecture Award, the premier recognition by the Biomedical Engineering Society for outstanding achievements and leadership in the science and practice of biomedical engineering.
Douglas Densmore, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, focuses on the development of tools for the specification, design, and assembly of synthetic biological systems. Last year he stepped up his advocacy for the democratization of research. Densmore envisions creating a dedicated facility other scientists can use in a manner similar to how e-commerce uses cloud computing services. “We have all this unused biomanufacturing capacity, particularly in academic labs. My lab isn’t doing anything today, or over Memorial Day weekend. We could connect researchers who want to experiment but don’t want to have to set up a whole lab. They could submit jobs the same way you submit jobs for the cloud.”
Angela Onwuachi-Willig, renowned legal scholar and expert in racial and gender inequality as well as civil rights law, wrapped up her first year as dean of the BU School of Law in 2019. A prolific writer and authority on employment discrimination and law as it relates to social injustice, Onwuachi-Willig has published extensively in leading law journals, including the Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, and the Georgetown Law Journal.
