2/27/2025 Jackson Brunner
Written by Jackson Brunner
Jennifer A. Lewis, an alumna of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has been awarded the prestigious 2025 James Prize in Science and Technology Integration from the National Academy of Sciences.
Key Highlights:
- The award comes with a $50,000 prize recognizing outstanding interdisciplinary contributions.
- Lewis will be honored at the National Academy of Sciences' 162nd annual meeting on Sunday, April 27.
- The ceremony will be available via livestream for global viewing.
Now at Harvard University, Lewis has revolutionized multiple fields by developing functional, structural and living materials that enable applications ranging from printed electronics to vascularized human tissues.
Lewis' groundbreaking contributions include creating electrically and ionically conductive inks for printing electronic devices and lithium-ion batteries at the microscale. Her more recent work focuses on using human stem cell-derived organoids to build perfusable 3D organ-on-chip models and vascularized tissues for drug screening, disease modeling and therapeutic applications.
What's next: The James Prize honors Lewis's exceptional ability to adopt techniques from outside her field, integrating knowledge across disciplines to solve major contemporary challenges. Her innovations in new classes of printable materials, multi-material printheads and advanced 3D printing methods continue to open new possibilities for both electronic and biomedical applications.
Lewis will receive her award during a ceremony on Sunday, April 27, which will be livestreamed from the National Academy of Sciences' annual meeting.