Dr. Chris Jewell (BS, CHE, class of 2003, double major in molecular biology and Chemical Engineering) won two major awards at the recently concluded 2018 AIChE Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, PA. The AIChE Nanoscale Science & Engineering Forum (NSEF) selected Jewell for the 2018 Young Investigator Award, while the AIChE Materials Engineering and Sciences Division (MESD) awarded Jewell the Owens Corning Early Career Award.
The NSEF Young Investigator Award recognizes one individual each year for outstanding scholarship, commercialization, education, or service in nanoscience and nanotechnology by engineers or scientists in the early stages of their professional careers. The Owens Corning Early Career Award recognizes outstanding independent contributions to the scientific, technological, educational or service areas of materials science and engineering for a faculty member under the age of 40. As part of these two awards, Dr. Jewell delivered plenary lectures at the AIChE Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh in November 2018.
Dr. Jewell is currently an Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Bioengineering at University of Maryland.
After receiving a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and a B.S. in Molecular Biology at Lehigh in 2003, Dr. Jewell attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, completing his PhD in Chemical Engineering with Professor David Lynn in 2008. Following his graduate studies, Chris joined the Boston Consulting Group in New York City as a consultant in the Healthcare practice, where his work focused on R&D strategy development for leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology clients. In the fall of 2009, Dr. Jewell accepted a postdoctoral fellowship from the Ragon Institute to begin vaccine research at MIT with Professor Darrell Irvine in the departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering. Dr. Jewell held a concurrent appointment as a Visiting Scientist at Harvard.
Among the many awards and recognition that Chris has won include: NSF CAREER award, Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovator, the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy Young Investigator Award, the Melanoma Research Alliance Young Investigator Award, the University of Maryland Research and Scholar Award, and the University of Maryland's 2017 Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year. In 2012, Dr. Jewell appeared in USA Today representing the Chemical Engineering discipline as a “New Face of Engineering” during National Engineers Week. Chris was also selected in 2013 as the state of Maryland’s Outstanding Young Engineer by the Maryland Academy of Science, the state’s highest professional honor awarded to an engineer under 36.
His research focuses on understanding the interactions between synthetic materials and lymph nodes, and exploiting these interactions for therapeutic vaccination. Earlier this year, Dr. Jewell received a $1.4 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) Research Project Grant (R01) for his efforts to study the immunology behind autoimmune disease and develop new advanced therapies for diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS).
