Michael Mitchell Receives BMES Rising Star Award

Michael Mitchell Receives BMES Rising Star Award

Michael Mitchell, Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation in the Department of Bioengineering, has received a Rising Star Award in Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering from the Biomedical Engineering Society.

The Rising Star award is selected by the Biomedical Engineering Society’s Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Special Interest Group:

The BMES Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Special Interest Group brings together researchers with diverse scientific and clinical interests with a common goal of understanding and engineering molecules, cells, their interactions and microenvironments in the pursuit of controlling biological processes and improving the practice of medicine.

To maintain its multidisciplinary character and central research focus, the CMBE SIG is committed to supporting new investigators within the field. Towards this goal, the “Rising Star” award has been given to a select group of exceptional junior principal investigators each year.

Mitchell received the award and delivered a lecture at the 2019 Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Conference earlier this month.

One of six early-stage investigators from across the nation to receive the honor, Mitchell was recognized for his work on engineering delivery technologies for cancer gene therapy and immunotherapy, which is helping to lay the foundation for a new class of therapeutic strategies against hematologic cancers such as multiple myeloma and leukemia.

In 2018, Mitchell was awarded the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award for this research, and received the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface in 2016. He joined the Penn faculty in January 2018 after completing an NIH NCI postdoctoral fellowship with Robert Langer at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.