Northwestern University biomedical engineer Jonathan Rivnay has been named the National Laureate in Physical Sciences and Engineering for the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists, a distinction previously awarded to only one Northwestern professor.
The Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences announced the laureate winners during the Blavatnik Awards ceremony at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The laureates will each receive $250,000, the largest unrestricted scientific award available to early-career scientists in the U.S., while the remaining 15 finalists will receive $15,000.
A total of 18 finalists and laureates, all aged 42 and younger, were chosen from 372 nominees representing 187 academic and research institutions across 43 states and Washington, D.C.
“I’m humbled to be recognized alongside so many outstanding finalists doing such impactful work,” Rivnay stated. “This recognition reflects the efforts of an amazing team — both past and present — whose ideas, dedication, and creativity have made our work possible.”
The Blavatnik Award recognized Rivnay for his work in bioelectronics and a new class of “living pharmacies” that provide personalized treatments for diseases such as diabetes, ovarian cancer, and sleep disorders.
Rivnay’s research focuses on soft electronics that communicate with biological systems, incorporating materials that mimic how these systems send messages. He combines electronic materials with living tissues to create devices that can produce and release medications directly into patients, optimizing treatment personalization beyond clinical settings.
Currently, Rivnay is leading a project funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to develop biohybrid devices capable of producing biologic drugs for personalized cancer immunotherapy. Additionally, he is developing living pharmacies offering digital prescriptions for type 2 diabetes and obesity, necessitating new devices that can split water to produce oxygen, ensuring long-term viability of transplanted cells.
Rivnay is launching the Living Electronics Initiative at Northwestern this year. “The intersection of electronics and engineered biology presents tremendous opportunities to create technologies that can sense, respond, and engage with biology in innovative ways,” he noted, highlighting broad applications across medicine, robotics, manufacturing, and the environment.
Among his accolades, Rivnay has received the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award, the U.S. Office for Naval Research Young Investigator Program Award, was named a 2025 American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Fellow, and was recognized as a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher from 2023 to 2025.
Rivnay holds the Jerome B. Cohen Professorship in Engineering and serves as a professor of biomedical engineering and materials science and engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, where he has been on faculty since 2017.
William Dichtel, the Robert L. Letsinger Professor of Chemistry at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, received the Blavatnik National Award in Chemistry in 2020, with six other Northwestern faculty having previously been named finalists.
