The National Academy of Inventors Fellows were nominated by their peers for outstanding contributions to innovation.
Chemist Joseph DeSimone, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and N.C. State University, has been named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), a nonprofit organization that recognizes investigators who translate their research findings into inventions that benefit society, drive economic development and improve lives. DeSimone is a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The 143 inventors named as NAI fellows represent 94 universities, governmental and nonprofit research institutes. Together, they hold more than 5,600 U.S. patents.
In 2005, DeSimone and his students invented the PRINT (Particle Replication In Non-wetting Templates) technology, enabling DeSimone to launch Liquidia Technologies, Inc. which now has a major focus on the development of new vaccines. Applications of PRINT are also being explored for next generation cancer therapies, inhalation therapies, environmentally friendly marine coatings and synthetic blood.
Last December, Oliver Smithies, Nobel Prize winner and Weatherspoon Eminent Distinguished Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at UNC, and Holden Thorp, former Carolina chancellor and chemistry professor, were named inaugural fellows of NAI.
DeSimone is the Chancellor’s Eminent Professor of Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Chemical Engineering at N.C. State University and of Chemistry at UNC. He also is an adjunct faculty member at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
This article was originally published by UNC News Services. To access the original article, click here.
Date: Dec. 10, 2013