Darrell Irvine received the B.S./B.Phil in Engineering Physics from the University of Pittsburgh (1995) and the Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT (2000). After a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford, Prof. Irvine joined the MIT faculty in 2002, with dual appointments in DMSE and the Department of Biological Engineering.
Professor Irvine’s research joins the physical sciences, engineering, and immunology, developing synthetic materials with two goals. His group seeks to modulate the function of immune cells by mimicking signals derived from the immune system or foreign pathogens, as a probe for cell function and as a tool for immunotherapy, both in vitro and in vivo. Secondly, they hope to create in vitro and in vivo models of the microenvironment present in lymphoid and non-lymphoid tissues, to better understand immunobiology in health and disease. Ultimately, this work aims to modulate immune response to use the body’s natural defenses against viral infections, transplant rejects, and tumors.
In addition to running a ground-breaking research program, he is widely recognized as an excellent teacher, both as one of the developers of the undergraduate core curriculum and in the graduate biomaterials program. UROPs working in his laboratory have opportunities to carry out long-term research and are recognized with publications.
His excellence has been acknowledged inside and outside MIT with awards and honors. He has received the NSF CAREER award and the Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award and was named one of the Technology Review TR100 in 2004 and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2008.