Martin Yarmush

Martin (Maish) L. Yarmush (born October 8, 1952 in Brooklyn, New York) is an academic, American scientist, physician, and engineer known for his work in biotechnology and bioengineering.

His faculty career began in 1984 at MIT as a Principal Research Associate (Associate Research Professor) in the Department of Chemical Engineering.

In 1988 he joined Rutgers University, as Professor of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering.

In 1995, he returned to the Boston area to serve as the Helen Andrus Benedict Professor of Surgery and Bioengineering in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, and to establish the Center for Engineering in Medicine at the Harvard Affiliated Teaching Hospitals.

The center was established in 1995 within several Harvard Medical School - Affiliated Teaching Hospitals (Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Beth Israel Hospital) in coordination with MIT, Harvard University, and Boston's Shriners Hospitals for Children, with support from the Whitaker Foundation.

At the time, Yarmush was the Helen Andrus Benedict Professor of Surgery and Bioengineering in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and at Harvard Medical School.

Yarmush currently holds the Paul and Mary Endowed Chair in Science and Engineering at Rutgers University and also serves as a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

He also holds a Bioengineer position at the Massachusetts General Hospita, a Lecturer in Surgery and Bioengineering position at Harvard Medical School, and a Senior Scientific Staff position at the Shriners Hospital for Children, Boston.

Yarmush has published over 570 peer-reviewed articles with an H index of 110 (Google Scholar).

Yarmush has filed patents for more than 60 inventions in medical and technical fields and is a member of the National Academy of Inventors.

He has worked on wound healing, metabolic engineering, dynamic microfabricated cell and tissue systems, biomedical devices, cell therapies, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, including the development of non-invasive treatments to prevent scarring after burns.

Yarmush has led a team that has developed storage protocols that can increase the amount of time that a donor organ can be kept and still be viable for use in human transplant operations.

Yarmush has led development of a robot for drawing blood samples which can be analyzed with a point-of-care downstream processing and analysis system.

This device could decrease the most frequent type of clinical injuries for both patients and hospital staff, and provide immediate results to doctors.

The venipuncture robot has been recently tested in a human clinical trial.

Yarmush is the founding editor of the Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering which was first published in 1999 by the nonprofit publisher Annual Reviews.

He is a series editor for the book series Frontiers In Nanobiomedical Research.

In 2007 he returned to Rutgers to hold the Paul and Mary Monroe Endowed Chair in Science and Engineering and serve as Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

He also holds a Lecturer in Surgery and Bioengineering position at Harvard Medical School, and is a member of the Senior Scientific Staff at the Shriners Hospital for Children, Boston.

In 2017, Yarmush was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering "for pioneering advances in cellular, tissue, and organ engineering and for leadership in applying metabolic engineering to human health."

Yarmush attended the Hebrew Institute of Boro Park (Yeshivat Etz Chaim), Yeshiva University of High School of Brooklyn (BTA), Yeshiva University, The Rockefeller University, Yale University School of Medicine, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Yarmush has worked as a professor at MIT, Harvard, and Rutgers and has held adjunct positions at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.

He is known for his scholarly contributions to many areas of biotechnology and bioengineering; and for the many students and fellows that he has trained who have gone on to significant academic and industrial careers.

He also serves as the founding Director of the Rutgers Predoctoral Biotechnology Training Program which has received continuous financial support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for 34 years.

Yarmush is the founding director of the Center for Engineering in Medicine & Surgery (CEMS) based at the Massachusetts General Hospital.