Antonios Mikos, the Louis Calder Professor of Bioengineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Rice, is the recipient of the 2023 International Award of the European Society for Biomaterials (ESB).
The award honors “scientists who have generally spent their career outside Europe, who have been internationally recognized, have a high scientific profile, and have made major contributions to the field of biomaterials.”
Mikos earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Purdue University in 1988. He was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT and Harvard Medical School before joining the Rice faculty in 1992. He is director of the Biomaterials Lab, the Center for Engineering Complex Tissues, the Center for Excellence in Tissue Engineering and the J.W. Cox Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering at Rice.
His research focuses on the synthesis, processing and evaluation of biomaterials for use as scaffolds in tissue engineering, carriers for controlled drug delivery, nonviral vectors for gene therapy and as platforms for disease modeling. His work has led to development of orthopedic, dental, cardiovascular, neurologic and ophthalmologic biomaterials.
He is the author of more than 700 publications and holds 32 patents. According to Google Scholar, Mikos’ publications have been cited more than 96,000 times and his h-index is 161.
Mikos has mentored and supervised 70 Ph.D. students and 40 postdoctoral fellows. He is the editor of 15 books, including Tissue Engineering Principles and Practices (CRC Press, 2013) and Principles of Regenerative Medicine (Elsevier Academic Press, 2019), and author of the premier undergraduate textbook on biomaterials, Biomaterials: The Intersection of Biology and Materials Science (Pearson, 2008; second edition, 2023).
Mikos is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors, the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the Academia Europaea, and the Academy of Athens. Mikos was awarded the 2019 Acta Biomaterialia Gold Medal.
He has been recognized with honorary doctorates from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the University of Crete, Heraklion, and honorary professorships at Sichuan University, Chengdu and Chinese PLA General Hospital, Beijing. He has served as a distinguished visiting professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Tsinghua University.
Mikos will formally receive the award at the Annual Conference of the EBS to be held Sept. 4-8 in Davos, Switzerland.