Speakers

Tejal A. Desai is currently the Sorensen Family Dean of Engineering at Brown University. An accomplished biomedical engineer and academic leader, Desai’s research spans multiple disciplines including materials engineering, cell biology, tissue engineering, and pharmacological delivery systems to develop new therapeutic interventions for disease. She seeks to design new platforms, enabled by advances in micro and nanotechnology, to overcome challenges in therapeutic delivery. With more than 275 peer-reviewed articles and patents, Desai’s research has earned her numerous recognitions including Technology Review’s “Top 100 Young Innovators,” Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10” and the Dawson Biotechnology Award. She served as president of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering from 2020 to 2022 and is a fellow of AIMBE, IAMBE, CRS, and BMES. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2015, the National Academy of Inventors in 2019, and to the National Academy of Engineering in 2024. Desai was also awarded the 2023 Robert A. Pritzker Distinguished Lecture Award at the Biomedical Engineering Society Annual Meeting — the highest honor the organization can bestow upon an individual who has demonstrated impactful leadership and accomplishments in biomedical engineering science and practice.

Professor Jason S. Lewis holds the Emily Tow Chair at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), where he is Deputy Director of the Sloan Kettering Institute overseeing Science Education and Training and an expert in radiochemistry and molecular imaging. He earned degrees in Chemistry and Biochemistry from the University of Essex and University of Kent, with postdoctoral work at Washington University. He joined MSK in 2008. A former president of WMIS and SRS, he is a Fellow of six professional societies and recipient of numerous awards, including the SNMMI Welch and Aebersold Awards, WMIS Gold Medal, and ACS Seaborg Award. He leads a research program on radiopharmaceuticals and imaging agents, holds NIH and NCI grants, and directs multiple training programs, with over 350 publications in the field.

Milan Mrksich is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor at Northwestern University with appointments in the Departments of Chemistry, Biomedical Engineering, and Cell & Developmental Biology. He served as Northwestern’s Vice President for Research, was the Founding Director of the Center for Synthetic Biology, and an Associate Director of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center. He earned a BS degree in Chemistry from the University of Illinois and a PhD in Chemistry from Caltech. He then served as an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University before joining the Chemistry faculty at the University of Chicago in 1996, where he remained until his move to Northwestern in 2011. His laboratory has pioneered several programs, including strategies to integrate living cells with microelectronic devices, the SAMDI biochip technology for high throughput experiments, and the megamolecule approach to making synthetic proteins for therapeutic applications. His honors include the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the TR100 Innovator Award, the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, the Illinois Bio ICON Innovator Award, and the Pittsburgh Analytical Chemistry Award. Dr. Mrksich serves as an Associate Editor for ACS Nano, as the Scientific Director of the Searle Scholars Program, and on the Board of Directors for the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation.

Amy Q. Shen is Provost and Professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), Japan, where she leads the Micro/Bio/Nanofluidics Unit. Her research focuses on microfluidics, biosensing, and lab-on-a-chip technologies at the bio/nano interface. She develops platforms that integrate nanoplasmonic, electrochemical, and polymer-based approaches for rapid and ultrasensitive health diagnostics, and leverages microfluidics to inform device design and function. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Society of Rheology, and has received several prestigious honors, including the NSF CAREER Award and a Fulbright Scholarship. Amy serves as Associate Editor for Soft Matter and is on the editorial boards of ACS Sensors and Biomicrofluidics.