Robert M. Nerem has been selected for the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society (TERMIS) – America’s chapter annual meeting for the over forty years that he has dedicated to the bioengineering community.  Nerem has lead several national efforts throughout his career and this awards was given in recognition of all of his service.   

Nerem obtained a B.S. degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Oklahoma, and subsequently his Ph.D. in 1964 from The Ohio State University.   As a young academic working in aerospace engineering, his initial research was to study radiation from high temperature shock-heated gases.  In the late 1960’s, however, he became interested in bioengineering, and after spending the better part of 1970 at Imperial College, London working in the Physiological Flow Studies Unit, he came back to Ohio State with the goal of phasing out his shock tube research and moving into bioengineering space.  In the beginning of this next phase of his career, his focus was on hemodynamics and its role in atherosclerosis, and this led to a lifelong fascination with the vascular endothelium.
 
In 1979 he moved to the University of Houston where he established a cell culture laboratory and began his studies on the effect of physical forces on cell function.  When he moved in 1987 to the Georgia Institute of Technology, he continued his research in cell engineering and in 1988 he received his first grant in the area of tissue engineering.
 
Nerem has been recognized several times throughout his career, including being a Fellow of TERMIS and a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.  He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is a Foreign Member of both the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. Nerem also holds honorary doctorates from the University of Paris, Imperial College London and Illinois Institute of Technology.
 
In addition, Nerem co-chaired the task force that led to the formation of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 1991, and he was the founding AIMBE president.  From 2002 to 2004 he was president of the Tissue Engineering Society International, the forerunner of TERMIS, and he participated in the discussions that led to the formation of TERMIS.

Most recently, in 2012, he chaired a group that conducted a global assessment of stem cell engineering, and this year chaired the organizing committee for a workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation on “New Directions for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine”  which was focused on stem cell engineering and their approach both in basic stem cell research and in the translation into clinical therapies and commercial products.