Chemical engineering thermodynamics, transport, and chemical kinetics, so useful for manufacturing processes, are fruitful tools for exploring biological systems, as well. Biological engineering research may be directed at molecular level processes, the cell, tissues, the organism, and large-scale manufacturing in biotech processes. It may be applied to producing specialized proteins, genetic modification of cells, transport of nutrients and wastes in tissue, therapeutic methods of drug delivery, tissue repair and generation, purification of product molecules, and control strategies for complex bio-production plants. Its methods include analytical chemistry and biochemistry techniques, bioinformatic processing of data, and computational solution of chemical reaction and transport models. Biological engineering is an extraordinarily rich area for chemical engineers, and its consequences - theoretical, medical, commercial - will be far-reaching.

In the Department, you will find expertise in protein manipulation, metabolic processes, tissue regeneration, cellular function, bioprocesses, bioinformatics, drug delivery, biomaterials, experimental and computational methods, and many other areas of biological engineering. View the pages of individual faculty members to learn about recent and ongoing research.

Daniel Blankschtein	Professor	617.253.4594 dblank@mit.edu	colloid and interface science, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, environmental and biomedical aspects of structured fluids, bioseparations, transdermal drug delivery
Arup K. Chakraborty	Professor	617.253.3890 arupc@mit.edu	cell-cell recognition in immunology, T cell biology, polymers and membranes, statistical mechanics
Clark K. Colton	Professor	617.253.4585 ckcolton@mit.edu	biomedical engineering, biochemical engineering, mass transfer
Charles L. Cooney	Professor	617.253.3108 ccooney@mit.edu	biochemical engineering
William M. Deen	Professor	617.253.4535 wmdeen@mit.edu	bioengineering, transport phenomena, membrane separations
Patrick S. Doyle	Associate Professor	617.253.4534 pdoyle@mit.edu	biophysics, microfluidics separations, microrheology, polymer physics, transport phenomena
Marcus Karel	Emeritus Professor	617.253.6744 karel@mit.edu	physical chemistry of foods, controlled release of active ingredients in foods and pharmaceuticals, cryopreservation, food engineering
Robert S. Langer	Institute Professor	617.253.3107 rlanger@mit.edu	drug delivery, biotechnology, immobilized enzymes, biomedical engineering, biomaterials, tissue engineering
Douglas A. Lauffenburger	Professor	617.252.1629 617.253.4480 lauffen@mit.edu	cell, tissue, and biomolecular engineering; computational modeling of biological and physiological systems
Narendra Maheshri	Assistant Professor	617.258-8986 narendra@mit.edu	design and dynamics of genetic and metabolic networks, evolvability, synthetic biology
Kristala Jones Prather	Assistant Professor	617.253.1950 kljp@mit.edu	metabolic engineering, biochemical engineering, bioprocess engineering, synthetic biology
Gregory Stephanopoulos	Professor	617.253.4583 gregstep@mit.edu	metabolic engineering, biochemical engineering, biotechnology, bioinformatics
Daniel I.C. Wang	Institute Professor	617.253.2126 dicwang@mit.edu	bioreactor engineering, recombinant protein production, bioprocess monitoring and control, glycoprotein quality, protein stabilization
K. Dane Wittrup	Professor	617.253.4578 wittrup@mit.edu	molecular bioengineering, protein engineering, therapeutic protein biotechnology