Matthew DeLisa received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Connecticut in 1996; his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Maryland in 2001; and did postdoctoral work at the University of Texas-Austin, Department of Chemical Engineering. DeLisa joined the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University as an assistant professor in 2003. He was promoted to associate professor in 2009 and to professor in 2013, at which time he was named the William L. Lewis Professor of Engineering. He also recently served as a Gastprofessur at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich) in the Institut für Mikrobiologie.

Professor DeLisa’s research focuses on understanding and controlling the molecular mechanisms underlying protein biogenesis — folding and assembly, membrane translocation and post-translational modifications — in the complex environment of a living cell. His contributions to science and engineering include the invention of numerous commercially important technologies for facilitating the discovery, design and manufacturing of human drugs and seminal discoveries in the areas of cellular protein folding and protein translocation. DeLisa has received several awards for his work including an NSF CAREER award (2005), a NYSTAR Watson Young Investigator award (2004), a Beckman Foundation Young Investigator award (2005), an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator award (2006), and a NYSTAR Distinguished Faculty Award (2007), the inaugural Wiley-Blackwell Biotechnology and Bioengineering Daniel I.C. Wang award (2008), a Cornell Provost’s Award for Distinguished Scholarship (2009), the American Chemical Society BIOT division Young Investigator award (2010), and the Biochemical Engineering Journal Young Investigator award (2013). He was also named one of the top 35 young innovators (TR35) by MIT’s Technology Review (2005), was selected as the Allan P. Colburn Memorial Lecturer at the University of Delaware (2009), and was chosen to deliver the Keynote Lecture at the SIMB RAFT X Meeting (2013). Most recently, he was named the AIChE Division 15C Plenary Award Lecturer (2013), was selected to the IDA/DARPA Defense Science Study Group (2014-15), and was elected as a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2014).