Phillip Messersmith is the Class of 1941 WWII Memorial Professor of Bioengineering and Materials Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley, and currently chair of the Department of Bioengineering. He earned his BS and PhD degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University, he was a faculty member at University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University. Dr. Messersmith has published over 220 papers. Dr. Messersmith is a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Materials Research Society, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and AAAS. 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 Clemson Award for Basic Research from the Society for Biomaterials. His academic research is focused on bioinspired materials, biointerfacial phenomena, and regenerative medicine. He has 47 US patents awarded and is the cofounder of three startups.