Prof. Jennifer Lewis receives the 2025 James Prize

Harvard Professor Jennifer Lewis, one of the first and most proactive innovators in 3D bioprinting, has been awarded the 2025 James Prize in Science and Technology Integration by the National Academy of Sciences.

Lewis, who is Hansjorg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has been recognized for “outstanding contributions made by researchers who can adopt or adapt information or techniques from outside their fields, and thus integrate knowledge from two or more disciplines to solve a major contemporary challenge not addressable from a single disciplinary perspective.”

At SEAS, Lewis and her team develop the next generation of functional, structural, and living materials, enabling applications ranging from printed electronics to vascularized human tissues. The Lewis Lab integrates multidisciplinary expertise in materials science, soft matter physics, additive manufacturing, bioengineering, and stem cell biology to create new classes of printable materials, multimaterial printheads, and 3D printing and bioprinting methods.

Lewis and her team have created electrically and ionically conductive inks for printing electronic devices and lithium-ion batteries at the microscale and use stem cell-derived organoids to build perfusable 3D organ-on-chip models and vascularized tissues for drug screening, disease modeling, and therapeutic use.

The James Prize in Science and Technology Integration, awarded to Professor Jennifer Lewis, is presented annually and carries a $50,000 prize. It was established in 2020 and made possible through a generous donation from Robert “Bob” James, former Chairman & CEO of McCann Erickson Worldwide and former member and chair of the President’s Circle at the National Academies. The prize was created to honor scientists who work across domains and are often overlooked since most prizes are field-specific. James believed that “adapting ideas from other areas can inspire creative ways to solve problems better, quicker, and cheaper.”

The first James Prize was awarded in 2021 to Allon Klein and Aviv Regev for their concurrent development of now widely adopted massively parallel single-cell genomics to interrogate the gene expression profiles that define, at the level of individual cells, the distinct cell types in metazoan tissues, their developmental trajectories, and disease states, which integrated tools from molecular biology, engineering, statistics, and computer science.

Lewis earned a Sc.D. in Ceramic Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among her many honors, she received the NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow Award, the Brunauer and Sosman Awards from the American Ceramic Society, the Langmuir Lecture Award from the American Chemical Society, the Materials Research Society Medal, and a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Inventors and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.