Clifford Brangwynne

2024 Alumni Achievement Award

Cliff Brangwynne is a biophysical engineer whose trailblazing work is changing how the scientific community thinks about the way living cells organize and who has pioneered methods to further explore how these mechanisms are fundamental to human health and disease.

The June K. Wu ’92 Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Princeton University, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and director of the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute, Cliff focuses his research on biological self-assembly, an interdisciplinary study that brings together cell biology, biophysics, soft matter physics, materials science and chemical engineering. At this intersection, he discovered that living cells organize not just through structures defined by membranes but also through liquid-liquid phase separation, a fundamental physical process with the potential to revolutionize treatments for neurodegenerative diseases like ALS, among other clinical applications.

Cliff earned his bachelor of science in materials science and engineering from Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering in 2001 and a doctorate in applied physics in 2007 from Harvard University. He was a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden and a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden.

He was named a Searle Scholar in 2012 and is the recipient of numerous honors including an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, ASCB Emerging Leader Award, MacArthur Fellowship, Blavatnik Award and a 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, which honors transformative advances toward understanding living systems and extending human life.

His articles have appeared in such prestigious scientific journals as Cell, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, Nature, Physical Review Letters and the Journal of Cell Biology.