Purdue honors Professor Mikos for leadership in chemical engineering

Rice University Professor Antonios G. Mikos has received the 2008 Outstanding Chemical Engineer (OChE) Award from his alma mater – the Purdue University School of Chemical Engineering – for his leadership in fundamental and applied chemical engineering research and long-standing influence in shaping the chemical engineering profession.

Only 114 of more than 9,000 alumni have received this prestigious award, which will be presented to Mikos during an official ceremony in West Lafayette, IN in October.

Mikos is the J.W. Cox Professor of Bioengineering, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, and director of Rice's Center for Excellence in Tissue Engineering. For 16 years he has specialized in a broad range of research topics, including the synthesis, processing, and evaluation of new biomaterials for use as scaffolds for tissue engineering, as carriers for controlled drug delivery, and as non-viral vectors for gene therapy.

Mikos joined Rice in 1992 and has supervised 35 Ph.D. and 6 M.S. graduate students, and has trained 24 postdoctoral fellows. Mikos holds 23 patents, has authored more than 350 publications, and is a founding editor of the journals Tissue Engineering Part A, Tissue Engineering Part B: Reviews, and Tissue Engineering Part C: Methods. This winter he published his 11th book Biomaterials: The Intersection of Biology and Materials Science with Johnna S. Temenoff from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Mikos is also a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, a fellow of the International Union of Societies for Biomaterials Science and Engineering, and president elect of the North American Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society. Since 1993, he has been well-known across academia and the biomedical industry for the short course Advances in Tissue Engineering.

Mikos’ work has won several notable awards for the development of novel orthopedic, dental, cardiovascular, neurologic, and ophthalmologic biomaterials. In recent years, his research and service to the science community has earned numerous professional honors, including the Clemson Award for Contributions to Literature from the Society for Biomaterials (2001), the Marshall R. Urist Award for Excellence in Tissue Regeneration Research from the Orthopaedic Research Society (2005), the Robert A. Pritzker Distinguished Lecturer Award from the Biomedical Engineering Society (2007), the Edith and Peter O'Donnell Award in Engineering from The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas (2007), and the Alpha Chi Sigma Award for Chemical Engineering Research from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (2007).

Mikos received a Chemical Engineering degree from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece in 1983, and a doctorate in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University in 1988. From 1990-1991, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School.