Gregory Stephanopoulos - Biography#

Greg Stephanopoulos is the W.H. Dow Professor of Biotechnology and Chemical Engineering at MIT, and Instructor of Bioengineering at Harvard Medical School (1997-). He received his BS degree from the National Technical U. of Athens, MS from the U. of Florida and PhD from the U. of Minnesota, all in Chemical Engineering. He taught at Caltech between 1978-85, when he was appointed Professor of ChE at MIT. Between 1985-1995 he served as Associate Director of the MIT Biotechnology Center. The primary focus of his research has been on metabolic engineering, the engineering of microbes for the production of fuels and chemicals, with applications to industrial biotechnology and metabolism of cancer. He has co-authored or –edited 5 books, more than 450 papers (62,000 citations) and 60 patents and supervised more than 140 graduate and post-doctoral students. He co-founded the journal Metabolic Engineering, and served as co-editor-in chief and Editorial Board member of 10 scientific journals. He has consulted extensively with global biotech, phapmaceutical and chemical industries and served on the Advisory Boards of 5 academic departments. For his research and educational contributions, Prof. Stephanopoulos has been recognized with more than 25 major US and international awards. A full list is provided elsewhere in this nomination and on his CV, here a few are listed, like the R.H. Wilhelm Award, the 2014 Walker Award and the Founders Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering, all of AIChE, the 2010 ACS E. V. Murphree Award in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, the 2011 ENI Prize for Renewable and non-Conventional Energy, the 2016 Eric and Sheila Samson $1m Prime Minister Prize (Israel) and the 2017 Novozymes Prize. He is Member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE, 2003), Corresponding Member of the Academy of Athens (2011) and Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). He has Honorary Doctorate Degrees (doctor technices honoris causa) from the Technical University of Denmark (2005), the National Technical University of Athens (2015) and the Technical University of Dortmund (2019). Professor Stephanopoulos has served the professional organization as chairman of Division 15, member of the Board of Directors and Chairman of the AIChE Society for Biological Engineering. In 2014, he was elected as 2016 President of AIChE.