2023 BIOT Award Winners
We will be recognizing ten different scientists and engineers with our 2023 awards for their various contributions to the field of biotechnology.
Alan S. Michaels Award: Giorgio Carta, University of Virginia
Proteins at Chromatographic Surfaces – Conformational Change, Unfolding, and Aggregate Formation
Monday, August 14th at 10:40 am PST in Foothill G1
This award, sponsored by the Recovery Conference Series, recognizes outstanding research and practice contributions toward the advancement of science and technology for the recovery of biological products. Professor Carta is being recognized for his foundational contributions to the development of preparative protein chromatography and downstream processing of biomolecules.
Giorgio Carta is the Lawrence R. Quarles Professor at the University of Virginia. He received his Laurea in Chemical Engineering from the University of Cagliari, Italy, in 1980 and his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Delaware in 1984. He has authored/co-authored 175 refereed journal articles mainly in the area of adsorption and ion exchange.
He has authored the book “Heat and Mass Transfer for Chemical Engineers – Principles and Applications,” McGraw-Hill, 2021, co-authored the first and second editions of the book “Protein Chromatography – Process Development and Scale- Up,” Wiley-VCH, 2010 and 2020, and co-edited Section 16 “Adsorption and Ion Exchange” of Perry’s Chemical Engineers’ Handbook, McGraw-Hill, 7th, 8th, and 9th editions. He has served as a member of the Organizing Committee of the International Symposium on Preparative and Process Chromatography – PREP since 1997 and as the PREP Symposium Chair annually since 2009. In addition to his university teaching, he has also been involved extensively in professional education and has been a consultant for a number of chemical and pharmaceutical companies. He has served as chair of AIChE Area 2e Adsorption and Ion Exchange, as chair of AIChE Area 2g Bioseparations, as co-chair of the 2007 Fundamentals of Adsorption Conference – FOA9, and as a Member of the Board of the International Adsorption Society. He is a Fellow of AIChE and of IAS and has been recognized with the 2020 AIChE Area 2e Honorary Session.
Marvin J. Johnson Award in Microbial and Biochemical Technology: Matthew DeLisa, Cornell University
Making weak antigens strong: the design and engineering of next-generation conjugates for enhancing glycan-specific immune responses
Tuesday, August 15th at 11:20 am PST in Foothill F
The Johnson award, sponsored by Pfizer, Inc., is given in recognition of outstanding research contributions to microbial and biochemical technology. Professor DeLisa is being recognized for foundational contributions to the study of therapeutic proteins including glycobiology, immuneengineering, and proteostasis.
Matthew DeLisa received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Connecticut in 1996; his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Maryland in 2001; and did postdoctoral work at the University of Texas-Austin, Department of Chemical Engineering. DeLisa joined the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University as an assistant professor in 2003.
He was promoted to associate professor in 2009 and to professor in 2013, at which time he was named the William L. Lewis Professor of Engineering. He also recently served as a Gastprofessur at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich) in the Institut für Mikrobiologie. Professor DeLisa’s research focuses on understanding and controlling the molecular mechanisms underlying protein biogenesis — folding and assembly, membrane translocation and post-translational modifications — in the complex environment of a living cell. His contributions to science and engineering include the invention of numerous commercially important technologies for facilitating the discovery, design and manufacturing of human drugs and seminal discoveries in the areas of cellular protein folding and protein translocation. DeLisa has received several awards for his work including an NSF CAREER award (2005), a NYSTAR Watson Young Investigator award (2004), a Beckman Foundation Young Investigator award (2005), an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator award (2006), and a NYSTAR Distinguished Faculty Award (2007), the inaugural Wiley-Blackwell Biotechnology and Bioengineering Daniel I.C. Wang award (2008), a Cornell Provost’s Award for Distinguished Scholarship (2009), the American Chemical Society BIOT division Young Investigator award (2010), and the Biochemical Engineering Journal Young Investigator award (2013). He was also named one of the top 35 young innovators (TR35) by MIT’s Technology Review (2005), was selected as the Allan P. Colburn Memorial Lecturer at the University of Delaware (2009), and was chosen to deliver the Keynote Lecture at the SIMB RAFT X Meeting (2013). Most recently, he was named the AIChE Division 15C Plenary Award Lecturer (2013), was selected to the IDA/DARPA Defense Science Study Group (2014-15), and was elected as a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2014).
BIOT Young Investigator Award: Kevin Solomon, University of Delaware
Bacterial biomolecular condensates for control of protein activity
Tuesday, August 15th at 2:20 pm PST in Foothill E
This award, sponsored by Genentech, recognizes an outstanding young contributor to the field of biochemical technology who is also an active participant in the BIOT Division programs. Professor Solomon is being honored for the development of non-model microbes for biotechnology applications.
Dr. Kevin Solomon is an Associate Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware. He holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and bioengineering from McMaster University (Canada), an MS in Chemical Engineering Practice from MIT, and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from MIT.
He has been recognized with multiple awards for research, teaching, and service including a US Department of Energy Early Career Award (2019), an NSF CAREER Award (2022), the SIMB Early Career Award (2022), the Lloyd N. Ferguson Young Scientist Award from NOBCChE (2023) and the Microorganisms Journal Young Investigator Award (2022). He has provided expert testimony before the 116th US House of Representatives on the convergence of engineering and biology and has coauthored several technology roadmaps for engineering biology. His work focuses on identifying and developing environmental microbes and microbiomes that are well-adapted for applications in sustainability, materials, and health.
Van Lanen Service Award: John Kim, University of Alabama
Wednesday, August 16th at 10:00 am PST in Foothill D
This award recognizes an individual for outstanding contributions to the ACS Division of Biochemical Technology through committed and sustained service. Prof. Kim is receiving this award in recognition of his years of service and leadership to BIOT as a session chair, area coordinator and most prominently Membership Chair for a ten year period.
Dr. Yonghyun (John) Kim is an Associate Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Alabama (UA). He received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering and B.A. in Biochemistry
from Lafayette College (Easton, PA, USA) in 2002, and his Ph.D. in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC, Baltimore, MD, USA) in 2008.
He then received his post-doctoral training in oncology from Samsung
Biomedical Research Institute (Seoul, South Korea) from 2008 to 2011, after which he joined UA in 2012 as an assistant professor. John was recognized as Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor (2016) and Outstanding Faculty Member (2019, 2020), inducted into the National Academy of Inventors (2019), and awarded the Outstanding Faculty Research Impact Award (2023) and Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to Portugal (2022-2023). He currently serves as an editorial board member of Molecular Medicine Reports, an associate editor of Frontiers in Oncology, his department’s undergraduate curriculum coordinator, and a codirector of a Research Experience for Undergraduates program focused on interdisciplinary engineering applications of polymers. He has over 65 peer-reviewed publications, and his current research on bioengineering models of cancer stem cells is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, and the National Institutes of Health. John has been a member of ACS since 1999 and of BIOT since 2007, and he has served as an executive committee member of BIOT since 2013.
David Perlman Memorial Award Lecture: David Duffy, Quanterix Corporation
Digital detection of proteins
Wednesday, August 16th at 10:00 am PST in Foothill D
The 2023 Perlman Award recognizes David C. Duffy, for his role in establishing the field of digital immunoassays, enabling earlier detection of disease and approval of effective therapies.
David Duffy, PhD, is Senior Vice President, Research & Development, and Chief Technology Officer at Quanterix Corporation. David joined Quanterix in 2007 and leads the team of scientists developing its single-molecule detection technology. He is an inventor on 12 U.S. patents and has more than 20 publications in the fields of surface chemistry, microfluidics, and bioanalysis.
He was previously at Surface Logix, where he was the Director of Pharmacomer Technology. There David oversaw the development of a novel chemical technology that resulted in two drug candidates currently in Phase II clinical trials. Prior to that, David was at Gamera Biosciences where he was a co-inventor of a centrifugal microfluidic that was acquired and commercialized by Tecan. He was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. David was the first Sir Alan Wilson Research Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, and holds a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge.
W.H. Peterson Award
Tuesday, August 15th at 10:40 am PST in Golden Gate C1
The W.H. Peterson Award is granted each year by the Division of Biochemical Technology to student members who present outstanding research work in sessions sponsored by the division at ACS national meetings.
Best Poster Presentation: Sung Hyun Lee, University of Virginia
Sung Hyun Lee, a graduate student from Professor Matt Lazzara at the University of Virginia, is being honored for her presentation of “Distillation of global sensitivity and Sloppiness analysis results explains consequences of low plasma membrane RAF abundance in EGFR-ERK signaling” at the 2022 ACS BIOT Meeting in San Diego, CA. Sung Hyun Lee is a fifth-year Chemical Engineering Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia working in the lab of Dr. Matthew Lazzara.
Sung Hyun studies the spatiotemporal regulation of cancer cell signaling using integrated computational and experimental methods. She uses advanced sensitivity analysis methods to understand the effects of stoichiometric bottlenecks in signal transduction and is developing novel moving-boundary models to predict the poorly understood biophysical effects of receptor trafficking on the duration and length scales of intracellular signaling mechanisms. Sung Hyun earned a B.A. in Chemistry from Wellesley College, where she performed undergraduate research in the lab of Dr. Donald Elmore. She was previously employed as a Regulatory Affairs specialist at L’Oréal Korea.
Best Oral Presentation: Dana Motabar, University of Maryland
Dana Motabar, a graduate student from Prof. William Bentley at the University of Maryland, is being honored for her presentation of “Mediated electrochemistry to rapidly interrogate redox-based antibody modifications” at the 2022 ACS BIOT Meeting in San Diego, CA. Dana Motabar received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in bioengineering from the University of Maryland at College Park, College Park, MD, USA in 2013, 2015, and 2023, respectively.
She previously worked at AstraZeneca (MedImmune) for 3 years in purification process sciences where she supported the development of novel biopharmaceuticals. Since 2018, she has been a Graduate Assistant with the Fischell Department of Bioengineering, University of Maryland, and the Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research (IBBR) working under Dr. William E. Bentley. She served as the lead on industry-focused research collaborations supported by National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals (NIIMBL) and Advanced Mammalian Biomanufacturing Innovation Center (AMBIC) grants. Her current research interests include the electrochemical characterization of redox biology and the development of analytical methods for biotherapeutics development.
Young Professionals Award in Upstream & Downstream Processing: Wenning Chu, NCSU
Wednesday, August 16th at 10:40 am PST in Golden Gate C1
This award, sponsored by 3M, recognizes professionals under 10 years into their industrial career who present outstanding research or development work in the BIOT division poster session at the prior ACS national meeting. Dr. Wenning Chu, a postdoctoral scholar at NC-State University, is receiving the award for presentation of “Development of Peptide Ligands for the Purification of a-1 Antitrypsin from Recombinant Fluids” at the 2022 ACS BIOT Meeting in San Diego, CA.
Wenning Chu graduated from Zhejiang University with a Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering & Technology working in the lab of Prof. Dongqiang Lin and Shanjing Yao. His graduate research aims to high-throughput ligand screening for human serum albumin and antibody separation with mixed-mode chromatography. He established a high-throughput screening method based on a microtiter filter plate to optimize the protein chromatography purification process, including resin screening, adsorption performance investigation, elution optimization, etc.
Upon graduation, he was offered a full-time position as a postdoc research scholar in the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the North Carolina State University in the lab of Prof. Stefano Menegatti. His postdoc research focuses on the design and development of novel adsorbents for the purification of biological drugs (e.g., monoclonal antibodies (mAb), enzymes (alpha-1 antitrypsin, AAT), and viral vectors (Adeno-associated virus, AAV) for gene therapy) as well as the design and validation of processes that utilize said adsorbents to accomplish the continuous biomanufacturing of next-generation therapies. He is currently working on the development of peptide ligands to purify various AAVs from HEK293 cell lysates in the North Carolina Viral Vector Initiative in Research and Learning (NC-VVIRAL) at NC State University.
Biotechnology & Bioengineering Elmer Gaden Award Lecture: J. Christopher Love, MIT
Next-generation agile development and manufacturing of recombinant proteins
Monday, August 14th at 9:00 am PST in Foothill D
This award was established by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and the journal Biotechnology & Bioengineering in honor of its founding editor Elmer Gaden, Jr., and recognizes a high-impact paper reflecting exceptional innovation, creativity and originality as well as career achievement. The award is presented annually at the ACS national meeting at a session of the BIOT Division. This year, Professors J. Christopher Love and Stephen Cramer are being recognized for their paper “Development of a platform process for the production and purification of single-domain antibodies,” by Laura E. Crowell, Chaz Goodwine, Carla S. Holt, Lucia Rocha, Celina Vega, Sergio A. Rodriguez, Neil C. Dalvie, Mary K. Tracey, Mariana Puntel, Andrés Wigdorovitz, Viviana Parreño, Kerry R. Love, Steven M. Cramer, J. Christopher Love. Biotechnology and Bioengineering 118:3348-3358, 2021.
J. Christopher Love, Raymond A. (1921) and Helen E. St. Laurent Professor of Chemical Engineering, is a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. He is also an Associate Member at both the Broad Institute, and the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard. ove earned a BS in chemistry from the University of Virginia and a PhD in physical chemistry at Harvard University under the supervision of George Whitesides.
He extended his research into immunology at Harvard Medical School with Hidde Ploegh from 2004-2005, and at the Immune Disease Institute from 2005-2007. Love has been named a W.M. Keck Distinguished Young Scholar for Medical Research (2009), a Dana Scholar for Human Immunology (2009), and a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar. Love served as a Distinguished Engineer in Residence at Biogen from 2015-2016. He has co-authored more than 100 manuscripts and is an inventor on multiple patents related to single-cell analysis and biomanufacturing. Professor Love is co-founder of OneCyte Biotechnologies, HoneyComb Biotechnologies, and Sunflower Therapeutics. He also serves as an advisor to Repligen, QuantumCyte, Alloy Therapeutics, Amgen, and Pfizer.
Biotechnology & Bioengineering Elmer Gaden Award Lecture: Steven Cramer, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Next-generation agile development and manufacturing of recombinant proteins
Monday, August 14th at 9:00 am PST in Foothill D
Professor Steven Cramer is the William Weightman Walker Professor of Polymer Engineering
at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. His lab is currently conducting research on several areas related to protein-surface interactions and molecular bioprocessing.
Many of the past contributions from Professor Cramer and his students to the field of Chromatographic Bioprocessing have had dramatic impacts on the state of the art of this technology and its successful implementation for the biomanufacturing of biological products. In addition to his focus on downstream bioprocessing,
Professor Cramer is known worldwide for his expertise in separations in general. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the International journal Separations, Science and Technology for 20 years. Professor Cramer has won numerous awards including the ACS National Award in Separations Science and Technology, the ACS BIOT Division’s Michaels Award in the Recovery of Biological Products, and several awards from RPI including the Wiley Distinguished Faculty Award and the School of Engineering Outstanding Professor and Research Excellence Awards. In addition, he has been elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the American Chemical Society, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Importantly, the 55 Ph.D. graduates from the Cramer lab have had a significant impact with many of his former students now playing key leadership roles in the state of the art of industrial bioprocessing at most of the major biopharmaceutical and bioseparations companies worldwide as well as academia.