Robert Langer is an Institute Professor at MIT (there are 11 Institute Professors at MIT; being an Institute Professor is the highest honor that can be awarded to a faculty member). His h-index of 205 is the highest of any engineer in history and he has 1,080 issued and pending patents worldwide. His patents have licensed or sublicensed to over 250 companies. He served as Chairman of the FDA’s SCIENCE BOARD (it’s highest advisory board) from 1999-2002. Langer is also one of very few individuals ever elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors. He is one of only seven people to ever receive both the United States National Medal of Science and the United States National Medal of Technology and Innovation. He has also received the Charles Stark Draper Prize (considered the engineering Nobel Prize), Albany Medical Center Prize, the Wolf Prize for Chemistry, the Millennium Technology Prize, the Priestley Medal (highest award of the American Chemical Society), the Gairdner Prize, the Kyoto Prize and the Lemelson-MIT prize, for being “one of history’s most prolific inventors in medicine.” He holds 23 honorary doctorates including honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale.