Abstract:
More than 5.55 billion people globally have received a dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, equal to about 72.3 percent of the world population. At the time there was this idea that the vaccines were developed very rapidly. Yet, thousands of scientists world-wide (my lab included); from physicists to physicians, to biologists and engineers had been working for decades to understand and harness the potential of mRNA vaccines.
In this Saturday Engineering for Everyone session I will highlight the role of engineers during the highly interdisciplinary and collaborative development of the COVID-19 vaccines. Not just in terms of deployment at scale, as it would be expected, but in the actual design of the molecular building blocks of one of the most impactful materials of our time: mRNA and lipid nanoparticles.
Bio:
Cecilia Leal is a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Bioengineering, and Carle Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Cecilia graduated in Industrial Chemistry (a Chemistry and Chemical Engineering joint major) at the University of Coimbra, Portugal and received a PhD in Physical Chemistry at the University of Lund, Sweden under the supervision of Håkan Wennerström, the 2001-2006 chairman of the Chemistry Nobel Prize committee. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the group of Cyrus Safinya before starting her appointment at UIUC in 2012. Cecilia received the Provost Distinguished Promotion Award for Full (2024) & Associate (2019) Professors, the 2023 University Scholar Award, the Dean's Award for Excellence in Research for Associate (2021) and Assistant (2018) Professors, and the 2016 NIH Director’s New Innovator and NSF CAREER Awards. Cecilia is often in the list of excellent teachers ranked by her students and received the 2022 College Award for Sustained Excellence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.