What do Today’s Best Innovators have to say?

Dr. Joseph Desimone is an accomplished innovator and chemical engineer at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. His resume boasts such high honors as the $2.5 million Pioneer Award from the NIH and the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize. At the same time he also serves as a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. He currently holds distinguished seats as both the Chancellor’s Eminent Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Chemical Engineering at North Carolina State University. His first innovation involved using supercritical carbon dioxide to create a more eco-friendly dry cleaning process. Then he moved on to more efficient ways of producing Teflon® and producing bio-absorbable cardiovascular stents. Currently, the Desimone research group is focused on producing precise nanoparticles using a fabrication method he patented himself. These nanoparticles can be filled with a variety of substances, ranging from chemotherapeutic drugs and asthma medication, to vaccines. Desimone recently launched a spin-off company called Liquidia to further expand the capabilities of his nanoparticle fabrication technology.