TRB Distinguished Biomaterials Lecture

TRB presents the 2022 Distinguished Biomaterials Speaker

Linda Griffith, PhD

“Deconstructing and Reconstructing the (Gynecology) Patient” 

Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering, Rm 101
April 25, 2022
4:30-6:00 pm

Registration is required.  Please RSVP by sending an email to mariamps@bu.edu.

With personal trainers and tailored suits, why don’t we have personalized medicine? Working at the interface of chemistry, biology, and engineering, we are designing strategies with the individual in mind. Before we get to the individual patient, we are investigating models of disease to determine how we can better understand disease progression and how we can stop and reverse that disease instead of merely treating its symptoms. I will tell three stories that are promising in cancer, blindness and stroke. In each story, I will highlight both the underlying innovation and the opportunities that lay ahead. I will end with two short stories on how we are commercializing some of our fundamental discoveries.

Linda G. Griffith is the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation in the Departments of Biological and Mechanical Engineering at MIT, where she directs the Center for Gynepathology Research. She has pioneered approaches in tissue engineering and organs-on-chips and now integrates these platform technologies with systems biology to humanize drug development.  She has chaired numerous scientific meetings, including recently the Keystone Tissue Organoids Conference (2020), and has co-chaired the Open Endoscopy Forum at MIT annually since 2015. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and several awards from professional societies. She is a co-recipient of the 2021 NAE Gordon Prize, for leadership in creating the new discipline of Biological Engineering. Dr. Griffith currently serves on the advisory board of the Society for Women’s Health Research and has served on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health. At MIT, she is a founding member of the Biological Engineering Department and led development of the undergraduate major in Biological Engineering, which was MIT’s first new undergraduate major in 39 years when it launched in 2005. She received her BS from Georgia Tech and PhD from UC Berkeley, both in chemical engineering.

Past TRB Distinguished Biomaterials Lectures

• February 2, 2021, Molly Shoichet, PhD, FRSC, Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Tissue Engineering at the University of Toronto.
• November 8, 2018 –Elliot L. Chaikof, M.D., Ph.D., Surgeon-in-Chief, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Johnson and Johnson Professor of Surgery, Harvard Medical School
• February 7, 2018 – Kristi S. Anseth, Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Associate Faculty Director of the BioFrontiers Institute, University of Colorado at Boulder
• February 22, 2017 – Kam Leong, Samuel Y. Sheng Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University
• March 23, 2016 – David Mooney, Robert P. Pinkas Family Professor of Bioengineering and Core Faculty Member, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University
• November 5, 2014 – Martin L. Yarmush, Director, Center for Engineering in Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School; Departments of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering, Rutgers University