Christopher M. Jewell is the Minta Martin Professor of Engineering in the Fischell Department of Bioengineering and a Research Biologist with the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. Dr. Jewell is also the Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection & Immunity during 2021. Jewell previously served as the Associate Chair for Research and the Director of the BioWorkshop Core Instrumentation Facility. Dr. Jewell graduated from Lehigh University with high honors in 2003 with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and a B.S. in Molecular Biology. He attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, completing his PhD in Chemical Engineering with Professor David Lynn in 2008. Chris then joined the Boston Consulting Group in New York City as a consultant in the Healthcare practice, where his work focused on R&D strategy development for global pharmaceutical and biotechnology clients. In 2009, Dr. Jewell accepted a postdoctoral fellowship from the Ragon Institute to begin vaccine research at MIT with Professor Darrell Irvine in the departments of Materials Science and Biological Engineering. Dr. Jewell held a concurrent appointment as a Visiting Scientist in the Division of Vaccine Research at Harvard. In August 2012, Chris established his lab at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on understanding the interactions between synthetic materials and lymph nodes, and exploiting these interactions for therapeutic vaccination.
Dr. Jewell has authored more than 100 papers and patent filings, including papers in ACS Nano, Biomaterials, Cell Reports, Nature Materials, PNAS, Nature, and Nature Biotechnology. These efforts have been supported by appxoimately $19M in funding. Chris's work has also been recognized by many awards for research and education, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) awarded by the White House. Dr. Jewell also previous served as an Associate Scientific Adviser for Science Translational Medicine, and has received the NSF CAREER Award, the Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award, the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy Young Investigator Award, the Melanoma Research Alliance Young Investigator Award, the University of Maryland Research and Scholar Award, and the University of Maryland's 2017 Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year. In 2019 Chris was awarded the NSEF Young Investigator Award and Owens Corning Early Career Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (2018), and elected as a a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). Dr. Jewell also received the University of Maryland's Research Communicator Impact Award (2018) and Clark School of Engineering's Outstanding Research Award (2018). Dr. Jewell leads the lab's outreach efforts, working with more than 500 area high school students to promote STEM research exposure, building community awareness about STEM opportunities in the cancer field, and fundraising for local and national charities. Chris was previously the recipient of a Society for Biomaterials STAR Award, an American Association of Immunologists Trainee Award, and the Controlled Release Society T. Nagai Postdoctoral Achievement Award. In 2012, Dr. Jewell appeared in USA Today representing the Chemical Engineering discipline as a “New Face of Engineering” during National Engineers Week. Chris was also selected in 2013 as the state of Maryland’s Outstanding Young Engineer by the Maryland Academy of Science, the state’s highest professional honor awarded to an engineer under 36.