Dr. Phillip Messersmith is the Class of 1941 Professor in the Departments of Bioengineering and Materials Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley. He earned his B.S. degree in life sciences from the University of Illinois at Urbana, M.S degree in bioengineering from Clemson University, and his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering in 1993 from the University of Illinois at Urbana. Previously, Dr. Messersmith was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University (1993-1994) and a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago (1994-1997) and Northwestern University (1997- 2014).
His awards and honors include a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health, the Langmuir Lecture Award from the American Chemical Society, and the 2013 Clemson Award for Basic Research from the Society for Biomaterials. Dr. Messersmith is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the International Union of Societies of Biomaterials Science and Engineering. Dr. Messersmith is a member of the National Advisory Dental & Craniofacial Research Council (the Advisory Council of the National Institute for Dental and Craniofacial Research of NIH). Dr. Messersmith is an inventor of over 30 US and international issued patents, has given over 300 invited lectures worldwide, chaired two Gordon Research Conferences, and is a member of the editorial advisory boards of several academic journals.