Aurel Stodola Medal for Jennifer A. Lewis
Jennifer A. Lewis has been awarded the Aurel Stodola Medal 2023 by the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering. At the award ceremony, the Harvard professor presented her groundbreaking research on the 3D printing of soft and living matter.
Organs from the printer: this vision could become reality in the future and thus solve the often desperate search for donor organs. For years, Jennifer A. Lewis, the double-titled Wyss Professor for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Jianming Yu Professor of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, has been researching novel printing techniques. Today, Wednesday, 20 September 2023, the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering (D-MAVT) at ETH Zurich honored her at the Audi Max with the Aurel Stodola Medal for her outstanding scientific work.
“Jennifer Lewis has pioneered advanced manufacturing technologies and recently excelled with the design of living matter that mimics natural systems in function and structure,” said Mark Tibbitt, Professor of Macromolecular Engineering at D-MAVT. “For these outstanding achievements, we are awarding her the Aurel Stodola Medal.” Tibbitt, along with Kristina Shea, Professor of Engineering Design and Computing at D-MAVT, had nominated the Harvard researcher for the award. “Jennifer Lewis is an internationally distinguished expert in the field of digital fabrication of soft functional, structural and biological materials,” Shea also emphasized. Patrick Jenny, the Head of Department of D-MAVT, presented the medal to Jennifer A. Lewis to great applause.
The award winner then started her presentation by giving insight into how she and her team create soft, living matter. She first introduced the basic principles of 3D printing. Then, she presented the cell-loaded inks developed with her team, as well as the multi-material printheads for direct and embedded printing of soft materials. Finally, Lewis shared her latest findings and the challenges of fabricating cardiac tissue.
The evening ended with a lively exchange over an aperitif.
Aurel Stodola Lecture
The annual Aurel Stodola Lecture commemorates the life and work of ETH professor Aurel Stodola, whose early 20th century work in the field of technical thermodynamics influenced a generation of engineers. In addition to the ground-breaking work in energy-producing machines, Stodola will also go down in history as the inventor of the first mechanical prosthesis, or what is known as the “Stodola Arm”. For the lecture, D-MAVT invites prominent figures with an international reputation for their achievements in the fields of mechanical engineering and process engineering.