Sorensen Family Dean of the School of Engineering Tejal Desai has been selected to receive the 2027 Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering (CMBE) Christopher Jacobs Award for Excellence in Leadership. The annual award commends Desai for demonstrating leadership excellence in the Cell and Molecular Bioengineering community.
Established in 2019, the award honors the memory and contributions of Christopher Jacobs, co-founder and council member of the CMBE Special Interest Group. Jacobs embodied a culture of volunteerism as a co-founder and council member of the CMBE Special Interest Group. For his decade-long service to the CMBE community, and for championing and leading the efforts to create a Special Interest Group in Cell and Molecular Bioengineering under the umbrella of the BMES parent organization, this award was named in his honor.
In her research, Desai uses micro- and nanoscale techniques to develop ways of targeting and delivering therapeutics to treat disease. She has more than 325 peer-reviewed articles and patents, focusing primarily on micro- and nanostructured biomaterials, therapeutic delivery, and immunoengineering. Desai has earned recognition as one of MIT Technology Review’s Top 100 Young Innovators, one of Popular Science’s Brilliant 10, and as the winner of the Robert A. Pritzker Distinguished Lecture Award from the BMES. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Inventors, as well as past president of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Most recently, she was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the world’s largest general scientific societies.
Desai will be honored at the 2027 CMBE Annual Conference in San Diego in January.
Date
November 2, 2026