Greg Stephanopoulos
Dr. Gregory Stephanopoulos is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. He received his B.S. Degree from the National Technical University of Athens, M.S. Degree from the University of Florida and his Ph.D. Degree from the University of Minnesota, all in Chemical Engineering. He joined, upon finishing his doctorate in 1978, the Chemical Engineering Faculty of the California Institute of Technology, where he served as Assistant and Associate Professor until 1985. In 1985 he was appointed Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT where he has been ever since. He served as Associate Director of the Biotechnology Process Engineering Center between 1990 and 1997 and in 2001 he was appointed Bayer Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. He is also the Taplin Professor of Health Sciences and Technology (2001-), Instructor of Bioengineering at Harvard Medical School (1997-), Member of the International Faculty of the Technical University of Denmark (2001-), and Fellow of the Singapore-MIT Alliance (2000-).
Professor Stephanopoulos' current research focuses on metabolic engineering and its applications to the production of biochemicals and specialty chemicals, the rigorous evaluation of cell physiology using advanced isotopic methods, the metabolism and physiology of mammalian cells with emphasis on obesity and diabetes, and bioinformatics and functional genomics, whereby new genomics-based technologies are applied to the elucidation of cell physiology and metabolic engineering. Professor Stephanopoulos has co-authored or -edited 5 books and published approximately 240 papers and 19 patents. He has supervised 38 graduate and 32 post-doctoral students and is presently the editor-in-chief of the journal Metabolic Engineering and serves on the Editorial Boards of 7 scientific journals. He has been recognized with the Dreyfus Foundation Teacher Scholar Award (1982), Excellence in Teaching Award (1984), Technical Achievement Award of the AIChE (1984), PYI Award (1984), AIChE-FPBE Division Award (1997), M.J. Johnson Award of ACS (2001), and the R.H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering of the AIChE (2001). In 1992 he chaired the FPBE Division of AIChE and was elected a Founding Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. In 2002 he received the Merck Award in Metabolic Engineering and was elected to the Board of Directors of AIChE. In 2003, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and recently was awarded an honorary doctorate degree (doctor technices honoris causa) by the Technical University of Denmark (2005).
Professor Stephanopoulos has taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in the chemical engineering curriculum at Caltech and MIT. He has also developed a number of new classes including Metabolic Engineering, Metabolic and Cell Engineering and, more recently, Bioinformatics. He has co-authored the first textbook on the subject of Metabolic Engineering and participated in the teaching of a number of biotechnology courses in the MIT summer sessions since 1985. He introduced and directed two such courses on the subjects of Metabolic Engineering (1995-99) and Bioinformatics (2000-).
He is presently directing a research group of approximately 20 researchers comprising ~15 graduate students, as well as post-doctoral fellows and visitors.