David Putnam elected Samuel B. Eckert Professor in Engineering

Cornell Engineering proudly congratulates David Putnam, elected the Samuel B. Eckert Professor in Engineering by the Cornell Board of Trustees. Endowed chairs are the highest faculty honor at Cornell.

David Putnam, a professor in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering and Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, also serves as associate dean for innovation and entrepreneurship. Putnam is one of the three original Meinig School faculty and a highly valued faculty member, researcher, leader and innovator at Cornell.

Putnam joined Cornell Engineering at Cornell University in 2002. Prior to joining the engineering faculty, he was an NIH postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT in the laboratory of Professor Robert Langer. From 2000 until 2002, he held a joint appointment MIT and as a Scientific co-Founder of a start-up company, TransForm Pharmaceuticals, Inc., which was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in March, 2005. In 2008-2009 he was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at PureTech Ventrures in Boston, MA where he focused on emerging technologies in the field of drug delivery. He is currently a member of seven Editorial Advisory Boards including Pharmaceutical Research, Journal of Controlled Release, Analytical Biochemistry and Experimental Biology and Medicine. His funding sources include NIH, NSF, the Coulter Foundation and the Department of Defense. He is a Fellow of AIMBE (reserved for the top 2% of Biomedical Engineers in the United States) and the Coulter Foundation. He received his B.S. in Pharmacy from Union University and his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of Utah.

The Putnam research group focuses on the design and synthesis of functional biomaterials. Using organic polymer chemistry and micro/molecular biology, we build biomaterial from first principles and apply them to human health. Research areas include vaccine/adjuvant design and delivery, synthetic lubricants, surgical devices and drug delivery systems.