Tejal Desai, Sorensen Family Dean of Engineering, has been selected as the 2023 Robert A. Pritzker Distinguished Lecture Award winner by the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES). The award is the highest BMES honor. The Biomedical Engineering Society is the lead society and professional home for biomedical engineering and bioengineering. Founded in early 1968, the Society has over 6,500 members.
As the winner, Desai will present a 20-minute lecture during the 2023 BMES Annual Meeting in October in Seattle. Each year, the Biomedical Engineering Society bestows this prestigious award to one individual who has demonstrated impactful leadership and accomplishments in biomedical engineering science and practice. In addition to the plenary lecture at the BMES Annual Meeting in the fall, Desai will publish an article in the Annals of Biomedical Engineering. Desai becomes the second Brown University faculty member to receive the award. Former professor Pierre Galletti, the first chief executive officer of Brown’s Division of Biology and Medicine who was instrumental in establishing Brown’s Medical School, was recognized in 1992.
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 existing challenges in therapeutic delivery. She has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles and patents. Her research efforts have earned numerous recognition including Technology Review’s “Top 100 Young Innovators,” Popular Science’s Brilliant 10, and the Dawson Biotechnology Award. She was President of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2020-2022) and is a fellow of AIMBE, IAMBE, CRS, and BMES. In 2015, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine and in 2019 to the National Academy of Inventors.
She received her B.S. from Brown University in biomedical engineering in 1994 and was awarded a Ph.D. in bioengineering jointly from UCSF and UC Berkeley in 1998.