Policy Punchline

Robert Langer is an acclaimed chemical engineer, professor, and investor in biomedical technology. He is one of 10 Institute Professors at MIT, which is the highest honor that can be awarded to a faculty member. He has written more than 1,500 articles, with 1,400 patents issued and pending worldwide that have been licensed to over 400 companies. He is the most cited engineer in history with an H-index of 283 and over 331,000 citations according to Google Scholar. His inventions are estimated to have affected over 2 billion lives, and his most recent public work involves the coronavirus vaccine created by Moderna, which is the biotech company he co-founded. In this interview, Arjun, Michael, and Tiger discuss with Prof. Langer his early career struggles as a freshly minted graduate student, his groundbreaking postdoc research on blood vessel growth for Judah Folkman that few believed could become reality, the future of tissue engineering technology, why the mRNA vaccine is safe and has withstood the test of