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Georgia Tech let $500,000 MacArthur fellowship recipient Linda Griffith's "inner nerd hang out."
Griffith, ChE 82, a biological and mechanical engineering professor at MIT and director of its biotechnology process engineering center, was among 25 fellows selected by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in September for their creativity, originality and potential to make important contributions. Each winner of the commonly referred to "genius awards" will receive $500,000 over the next five years.
"The award was a huge surprise and I am incredibly honored — and owe much of the credit to the fantastic environment at Tech when I was an undergraduate. Tech fostered independence and rigorous thinking but in an environment of collegiality and fun. It made engineering seem like a wonderful career."
Griffith is a biotechnologist who is shaping the frontiers of tissue engineering and synthetic regenerative technologies. She is offering the prospect of significant reduction in the need for future organ replacement or regeneration by developing a powerful tool for exploring the normal function of the liver and the mechanisms of disease that attack it.
Her latest experiments are expanding the use of 3-D scaffolds for growing other cell types, such as blood-forming cells. These experiments lay the groundwork for building in vitro models of toxicity and cancer metastasis.
Griffith, who earned a doctorate in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988 and joined the MIT faculty in 1991, told the Alumni Magazine in 2002, "I've refocused two-thirds of my lab toward building the human body on a chip."
Upon being named a MacArthur fellow, Griffith said she was grateful to Tech professor Ajit Yoganathan for giving her "great freedom and responsibility in his lab" when she was an undergraduate. In 2002 she credited Tech faculty with pushing her on to graduate school.
"I myself wouldn't have gone to grad school but one of my professors wrote on an exam he returned, 'Have you thought about grad school?' I hadn't. I didn't see myself in grad school. I saw all these guys as faculty and did not see myself as an academic. It's not that I thought they were smarter than me, but it took a lot of nudging and confidence-building things to get me there," she said.
"That's why I take the time with some of my students to ask them questions about their career goals, to give them encouragement and talk through with them what might be good options for them."
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