John Rogers named Guggenheim fellow

Prestigious fellowship award to four Northwestern professors

by Amanda Morris

Northwestern University faculty members Mesmin Destin, Vicky Kalogera, Jennifer Lackey and John A. Rogers are among the 2021 Guggenheim Fellows recently named by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

This year, the Foundation awarded 184 artists, writers, scholars and scientists from across the United States and Canada. Selected from a pool of nearly 3,000 applicants, the fellows were appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.

“I am thrilled to announce this new group of Guggenheim Fellows, especially since this has been a devastating year in so many ways,” said Edward Hirsch, president of the Foundation. “A Guggenheim Fellowship has always been meaningful, but this year we know it will be a lifeline for many of the new Fellows at a time of great hardship, a survival tool as well as a creative one. The work supported by the Fellowship will help us understand more deeply what we are enduring individually and collectively, and it is an honor for the Foundation to help them do what they were meant to do.”

John A. Rogers

Rogers is the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Neurological Surgery at the McCormick School of Engineering and at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He also is founding director of the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics (QSIB) and an affiliated faculty member of the International Institute for Nanotechnology.

A biointegrated electronics pioneer, Rogers develops electronic devices that can bend, stretch, twist and sometimes even dissolve harmlessly inside the body. These systems non-invasively integrate with the soft tissues of the human body to provide diverse, clinically relevant diagnostics and therapeutics. His interdisciplinary research combines expertise from nearly every traditional field of study in science and engineering, with outcomes that have changed the way people think about consumer and medical devices.

Rogers will use the fellowship to continue developing wireless, bioresorbable stimulators as bioelectronic medicine.

“This wonderful recognition belongs to a broad, talented collection of students and collaborators over the years — my name just happens to be attached,” Rogers said. “At a personal level, this fellowship has deep significance because my mother won a Guggenheim nearly 40 years ago as a poet, for creative writing.”