Professor Robert S. Langer is one of 9 Institute Professors at MIT, the highest honor that can be awarded to a faculty member. Dr. Langer has written more than 1,600 articles and has over 1,500 issued and pending patents worldwide. Dr. Langer’s patents have been licensed or sublicensed to over 400 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology and medical device companies. He is the most cited engineer in history, with more than 438,200 citations (according to Google Scholar).
He served as a member of the United States Food and Drug Administration’s SCIENCE Board, the FDA’s highest advisory board, from 1995 — 2002 and as its Chairman from 1999-2002.
Dr. Langer has received over 220 major awards. He is one of 3 living individuals to have received both the United States National Medal of Science (2006) and the United States National Medal of Technology and Innovation (2011). He also received the 1996 Gairdner Foundation International Award, the 2002 Charles Stark Draper Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineers, the 2008 Millennium Prize, the 2012 Priestley Medal, the 2013 Wolf Prize in Chemistry, the 2014 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, and the 2014 Kyoto Prize. In 2015, Dr. Langer received the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. Among numerous other awards Langer has received are the Dickson Prize for Science (2002), induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (2006), the Max Planck Research Award (2008), the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research (2008), the Terumo International Prize (2012), the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science (2016), the Kabiller Prize in Nanoscience and Nanomedicine (2017), and the Medal of Science (Portugal’s highest honor, 2020). Most recently, he has received the Dr. Paul Janssen Award for Biomedical Research (2023) and the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience (2024). In 1998, he received the Lemelson-MIT prize, the world’s largest prize for invention for being “one of history’s most prolific inventors in medicine.”
In 1989 Dr. Langer was elected to the National Academy of Medicine, and in 1992 he was elected to both the National Academy of Engineering and to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2012 he was elected to the National Academy of Inventors.
Forbes Magazine (1999) and Bio World (1990) have named Dr. Langer as one of the 25 most important individuals in biotechnology in the world. Discover Magazine (2002) named him as one of the 20 most important people in this area. Forbes Magazine (2002) selected Dr. Langer as one of the 15 innovators worldwide who will reinvent our future. Time Magazine and CNN (2001) named Dr. Langer as one of the 100 most important people in America and one of the 18 top people in science or medicine in America (America’s Best). Parade Magazine (2004) selected Dr. Langer as one of 6 “Heroes whose research may save your life.”
Dr. Langer has received 43 honorary doctorates. They include, among many others, degrees from Harvard University, the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, Yale University, Columbia University, the University of Western Ontario (Canada), ETH (Switzerland), the Technion (Israel), the Universite Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), the University of Nottingham (England), Pennsylvania State University, Northwestern University, Uppsala University (Sweden), Tel Aviv University (Israel), Boston University, Hanyang University (South Korea), the University of New South Wales (Australia), Karolinska Institutet (Sweden), Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Hong Kong), the National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (Mexico), the University of Limerick (Ireland), Macau University of Science and Technology, the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, and Chiba Institute of Technology (Japan).
He received his Bachelor’s Degree from Cornell University in 1970 and his Sc.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974, both in Chemical Engineering.
