Patrick Stayton currently serves as the Distinguished Career Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Washington. He received his B.S. in Biology (summa cum laude) from Illinois State University, his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Illinois, and was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, also at the University of Illinois. Stayton has been elected as a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and has been the recipient of the Clemson Award from the Society For Biomaterials and the CRS-Cygnus Recognition Award from the Controlled Release Society. He served as Co-Chair of the Gordon Conference on Drug Carriers in Medicine and Biology in 2010. He has also been awarded the 2009 UW College of Engineering Faculty Research Innovation Award, and a Distinguished Teacher and Mentor Award from the Department of Bioengineering.
Stayton’s eclectic research group works at the interface of molecular science and applied molecular bioengineering in the drug delivery, diagnostics, and regenerative medicine fields. Stayton has a strong interest in translational research; he has been awarded several patents and is a co-founder of the startup companies Instil, based on his group’s drugamer and cell therapy work, PhaseRx Inc., based on his group’s RNA delivery work, and Nexgenia, based on the lab’s biomanufacturing work.
Stayton was named director of the Molecular Engineering and Sciences Institute in October 2011.