Bentley Receives ACS BIOT’s Marvin J. Johnson Award

The American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Division of Biotechnology (BIOT) has awarded Fischell Department of Bioengineering (BioE) professor and chair William E. Bentley its Marvin J. Johnson Award in Microbial and Biochemical Technology. Bentley will be formally honored and deliver a lecture at a ceremony to be held at the national meeting of the ACS in March.

In a letter to Bentley, BIOT Awards Co-Chairs Matthew DeLisa (Cornell University) and Todd Przybycien (Carnegie Mellon University) cited him for his many contributions to the biotechnology field, “in particular for [his] innovative molecular and metabolic engineering contributions advancing protein expression, quorum sensing, RNA inhibition, and biofunctional devices.”

Bentley, the Robert E. Fischell Distinguished Professor of Engineering and founding chair of BioE, has been a member of the Clark School’s faculty since 1989. His research focuses on the development of molecular tools that facilitate the expression of biologically active proteins. His current projects include deciphering and manipulating signal transduction pathways, including those of bacterial communication networks, for altering cell phenotype. To enable discovery, his lab develops new strategies for opening “communication” between devices and biological systems by the creation and simple assembly of biologically functional interfaces. These concepts are emerging as a field of “biofabrication” that exploits biological components and processes for assembly. Bentley has authored over 250 related archival publications on his work. Outside of the lab and classroom, Bentley has served on advisory committees for the NIH, NSF, DOD, DOE, FDA, USDA, and several state agencies, and co-founded a protein manufacturing company, Chesapeake PERL, based on insect larvae as mini bioreactors. He is a Fellow of the ACS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering; and is an elected member of the American Academy of Microbiology.

Published February 11, 2014