Photo: Douglas A. Lockard / CC BY-SA 3.0 (source: Wikimedia Commons)
My Take
Robert Langer is the rare scientist whose work probably touches your life without you knowing his name. As an MIT Institute Professor, one of only a handful, he's operating at the absolute peak of academic engineering. What impresses me most is the breadth of recognition: the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the Princess of Asturias Award, the Perkin and John Fritz Medals. That's not a niche specialist; that's someone whose drug-delivery and tissue-engineering ideas reshaped biotechnology. The Cornell-to-MIT path tracks, and the sheer award count tells me he turned lab insight into real-world medicine again and again.
Overview
Robert Samuel Langer Jr. FREng (born August 29, 1948) is an American biotechnologist, businessman, chemical engineer, chemist, and inventor. He is one of the nine Institute Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1. Profile
- Name (English)
- Robert S. Langer, Jr.
- Name (Japanese)
- ロバート・ランガー
- Reading
- ろばーと・らんがー
- Born
- August 29, 1948 (age 77)
- Zodiac / Chinese zodiac
- Virgo / Rat
- Origin
- Albany, New York, United States
- Blood type
- Private
- Height
- Private
- Agency
- Private
- Occupation
- inventor / university teacher / chemical engineer / biotechnologist / engineer
2. Background
- Elementary school
- Private
- Junior high
- Private
- High school
- Private
- University
- Cornell University College of Engineering
Awards & achievements
- 2014 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
- 2008 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research
- 2003 John Fritz Medal
- 2015 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering
- 2003 Harvey Prize
- 2012 Perkin Medal
- 2012 Wilhelm Exner Medal
- 2015 Scheele Award
3. Relationships
- Spouse
- Private
- Children
- Private
- Parents
- Private
- Siblings
- Private
4. Personality
Motto
Private
6. Links
Inventor — see all → · University teacher — see all → · More people from United States →
7. About this entry
Tags
- Last updated
- 2026-06-02
Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public items are marked "Private / Unknown". English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.