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Dr. Robert Langer at Landmark College

PUTNEY – Landmark College will present a talk by medical innovator Dr. Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, September 21, at the Brooks M. O’Brien Auditorium of the East Academic Building.

Dr. Langer’s talk is sponsored by Landmark’s Morgan Le Fay Center for Advances in Economics, Business, and Entrepreneurship Instruction.

Dubbed “The Edison of Medicine” in a recent Harvard Business Review profile, Dr. Langer has more than 1,100 issued and pending patents worldwide. His many awards include the National Medal of Science; the National Medal of Technology and Innovation; the Charles Stark Draper Prize; Albany Medical Center Prize; the Wolf Prize for Chemistry; the 2014 Kyoto Prize; and the Lemelson-MIT Prize for being “one of history’s most prolific inventors in medicine.”

Dr. Langer – who is the father of Landmark College alumnus Michael Langer ’15 – is also one of very few individuals ever elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Harvard Business Review’s profile of Dr. Langer stated that his approach to innovation is “accelerating the pace of discoveries and ensuring that they make it out of academia and into the real world as products.”

In his Landmark College talk, Dr. Langer will discuss his early career interest in seeing his inventions get to the point where they could help patients. He will talk about the process and excitement of discovery; initial resistance to the discovery, in some cases, by the scientific community; how technologies were transferred to companies; and the way they have been, or attempts are being made to, commercialize them.

Landmark College’s Morgan Le Fay Center was established in 2014 through a gift from economist Paul McCulley (the father of LC alumnus Jonathan McCulley ’14) and the Morgan Le Fay Dreams Foundation. The Center’s mission is to support the development and refinement of pedagogy in the fields of economics, business, and entrepreneurship in connection with the College’s current and future programs in those fields.

The talk by Dr. Langer is free and open to the public. To register, please visit www.landmark.edu/morgan.