For Release: April 20, 2009
Contact: dms.communications@dartmouth.edu, 603-650-1492
Noted Physician-scientist to Address Dartmouth Medical School Class Day June 13
Dr. Donald Ingber
Hanover, N.H.—Research pioneer Donald E. Ingber, MD, PhD, of Harvard is the keynote speaker for Dartmouth Medical School Class Day, a celebration for final year medical and graduate students receiving their degrees.
Class Day is June 13, 9 a.m. at the medical school. Ceremonies take place rain or shine under a tent in the parking lot at the corner of Maynard Street and Rope Ferry roads, Hanover.
Ingber is the first Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital, Boston, and professor of bioengineering at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Known for his ability to bridge the worlds of the physician, scientist and engineer, Ingber is founding director of Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. The Institute, created this year, seeks to develop materials and devices that will transform healthcare and create a more sustainable world by emulating the way nature builds.
Ingber's vision for the future of medicine includes, he says, "anticipatory medical devices that intervene automatically before life-threatening events occur, as well as injectable nanomaterials that target to injury sites and self assemble into scaffolds that promote organ regeneration from within."
The future of medicine includes "anticipatory medical devices that intervene automatically before life-threatening events occur, as well as injectable nanomaterials that target to injury sites and self assemble into scaffolds that promote organ regeneration from within."
—Donald Ingber
"As Dartmouth Medical School continues to transform medicine, we are fortunate to have a keynote speaker who is founding director of a unique institute," says DMS Dean William Green. "Dr. Ingber's love of medicine and how it intersects with research and engineering will, I am sure, provide us a portal of great things to come in our professions."
Ingber's research focuses on how cells go about sensing their surroundings and respond to mechanical forces as well as chemical signals to control their form and function during tissue development and in various diseases. His innovative work on how the shape of vascular cells and the physical properties of their environment influence whether they grow, specialize, move or die has contributed to the fields of angiogenesis (blood vessel growth), cancer, mechanobiology, systems biology, tissue engineering and nanobiotechnology.
Ingber is a graduate of Yale, where he received bachelor's, master's, medical and doctorate degrees. His early professional life was devoted to collaborative studies with the late Judah Folkman, another angiogenesis groundbreaker who was the 2004 DMS Class Day speaker.
-DMS-
