Director of MIT's Biomedical Engineering Center to present Rushmer Lecture April 3

Douglas Lauffenburger

Dr. Douglas Lauffenburger, director of the Center for Biomedical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will give the 10th annual Robert F. Rushmer Lecture for the Department of Bioengineering.

Lauffenburger will speak on "Engineering, Cell Biology and Molecular Medicine" at 4:30 p.m., Friday, April 3, in room D-209 of the Health Sciences Center. A reception and bioengineering poster session will follow in the I-Court Rotunda.

His lecture will offer an overview of work on what he calls "molecular cell bioengineering," demonstrating how an engineering perspective can contribute to basic studies of cell receptor biology and to application of findings to cytokine and gene therapy technologies.

Lauffenburger, who is J.R. Mares Professor of chemical engineering at MIT, received his training in chemical engineering, earning a Ph.D. in that field from the University of Minnesota in 1979. As a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, he was head of the Department of Chemical Engineering from 1987 to 1990. He then moved to the University of Illinois as a member of the faculty in both chemical engineering and cell and structural biology before accepting the appointment at MIT in 1995.

His major research interests are in the interface of engineering with cell biology. In particular, his laboratory is attempting to develop quantitative models that relate cell functions such as migration, adhesion and proliferation to biochemical and biophysical properties of receptor interactions that regulate these functions. The work is aimed toward providing design principles and parameters necessary for using genetic, pharmacologic and materials approaches to control cell functions for health care technology applications such as wound healing, cancer, inflammatory diseases and tissue regeneration.

Lauffenburger has been a consultant to several pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and is an editorial board member for leading bioengineering journals.

He is the author of Receptors: Models for Binding, Trafficking, and Signalling, published in 1993 by Oxford University Press. In additon to numerous honors, he was president of the Biomedical Engineering Society in 1996-97 and has been a director of the Food, Pharmaceutica and Bioengineering Division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

The lecture is named for Robert F. Rushmer, the founding director of the UW Center for Bioengineering, which became a department jointly administered by the schools of Medicine and Engineering last year. Rushmer is now professor emeritus of bioengineering. ¶