About the Award
The James Prize in Science and Technology Integration honors outstanding contributions made by researchers who are able to adopt or adapt information or techniques from outside their fields, and thus integrate knowledge from two or more disciplines (e.g., engineering, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, biomedicine, geosciences, astronomy, or computational sciences) to solve a major contemporary challenge not addressable from a single disciplinary perspective. The award is presented with a $50,000 prize.
Jennifer A. Lewis, Harvard University, will receive the 2025 James Prize in Science and Technology Integration.
Lewis has developed the next generation of functional, structural, and living materials, enabling technological applications ranging from printed electronics to vascularized human tissues.
Integrating multidisciplinary expertise in materials science, soft matter physics, additive manufacturing, bioengineering, and stem cell biology, Lewis has created new classes of printable materials, multi-material printheads, and methods of 3D printing and bioprinting.
Lewis’s work includes creating electrically and ionically conductive inks for printing electronic devices and lithium-ion batteries at the microscale. She is also using human stem cell-derived organoids to build perfusable 3D organ-on-chip models and vascularized tissues for drug screening, disease modeling, and therapeutic use.
Lewis will be honored in a ceremony on Sunday, April 27 during the National Academy of Sciences’ 162nd annual meeting. The ceremony will be livestreamed.
Award History
The James Prize in Science and Technology Integration was established in 2020 and made possible through a generous donation from Robert “Bob” James, former Chairman & CEO of McCann Erickson Worldwide and former member and chair of the President’s Circle at the National Academies. The prize was created to honor scientists who work across domains and are often overlooked, since most prizes are field-specific. James believed “adapting ideas from other areas can inspire creative ways to solve problems, better, quicker, and cheaper.”
The first James Prize was awarded in 2021 to Allon Klein and Aviv Regev for their concurrent development of now widely adopted massively parallel single-cell genomics to interrogate the gene expression profiles that define, at the level of individual cells, the distinct cell types in metazoan tissues, their developmental trajectories, and disease states, which integrated tools from molecular biology, engineering, statistics, and computer science.
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