Robert S. Langer


 * This article is about the professor at MIT, for the Australian cricketer see Rob Langer

Robert S. Langer (born August 29, 1948 in Albany, New York) is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was formerly the Germeshausen Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering and maintains activity in the department of chemical engineering and the department of biological engineering at MIT. His also a faculty member of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. He is a distinguished and highly regarded researcher in biotechnology, especially in the fields of drug delivery systems and tissue engineering. Dr. Langer's research laboratory at MIT is the largest biomedical engineering lab in the world, maintaining about $6 million in annual grants and over 100 researchers.

Langer's contributions to medicine and the emerging fields of biotechnology are highly recognized and respected around the world. He is considered a pioneer of many new technologies, including transdermal delivery systems, which allow the administration of drugs or extraction of analytes from the body through the skin without needles or other invasive methods. He and the researchers in his lab have also made significant advances in tissue engineering, such as the creation of vascularized engineered muscle tissue and engineered blood vessels.

Langer holds more than 550 granted or pending patents and has authored more than 900 scientific papers. He has proven adroit at bringing together academia and industry and has participated in the founding of more than two dozen companies. He has received numerous awards, including the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the Lemelson-MIT Prize and the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research. He is the youngest person in history (at 43) to be elected to all three American science academies: the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine.

Dr. Langer received his bachelor's degree from Cornell University in chemical engineering. He earned his Sc.D. in chemical engineering from MIT in 1974. His dissertation was entitled "Enzymatic regeneration of ATP" and completed under the direction of Clark K. Colton. From 1974-1977 he worked as a postdoctoral fellow for famed cancer researcher Judah Folkman at the Children's Hospital Boston and at Harvard Medical School. He has been an advisor to influential scholars in the fields of biomaterials, drug delivery systems, tissue engineering, and vascular medicine: W. Mark Saltzman, David J. Mooney, Lisa E. Freed, and Elazer R. Edelman.

Robert Langer and his wife, Laura, whom he met at MIT and who has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience, have three children.

Langer has an honorary degree from a number of universities from around the world including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the ETH Zurich.