Robert Langer, the Koch Institute Professor at MIT, was the featured speaker at the annual Neal R. Amundson Lecture sponsored by the UH Cullen College of Engineering’s Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department. The event was held at the UH Hilton on Friday, Feb. 6.
Langer is a world-renowned expert in chemical engineering who is credited as the first person to engineer polymers to deliver large molecular weight drugs for the treatment of diseases such as cancer and mental illness. He was recently named the winner of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. The organization cites his “revolutionary advances and leadership in engineering at the interface of chemistry and medicine,” and the award credits Langer for improving over 2 billion lives worldwide because of disease treatments that were developed in his lab.
This year’s Amundson Lecture attracted more than 150 audience members. Langer’s talk focused on the trials and tribulations he encountered as a researcher as well as the inevitable roadblocks he had to overcome in order to successfully file for patents and gain F.D.A. approval for the treatments discovered inside his laboratory.
The Amundson Lectures are held annually in recognition of the late Neal R. Amundson, former Cullen Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Mathematics at UH. He is widely regarded as the most prominent chemical engineering educator in the United States. His pioneering research has impacted the areas of modeling and analysis of chemical reactors, separation systems, polymerization and coal combustion. He has had a profound, pioneering impact on the education of chemical engineers, changing the teaching of the field from a qualitative, descriptive approach to precise scientific methodologies. He has long been an intellectual leader of the Chemical Engineering community, and he chaird the NRC committee that wrote the report on "Frontiers in Chemical Engineering."
To view photos from the 2015 Neal R. Amundson Lecture, please visit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cullencollege/sets/72157650716271892/.