Donald E. Ingber

Who is Donald E. Ingber?

Donald E. Ingber, is an American cell biologist and bioengineer, Founding Director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital, and Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is a founder of the emerging fields of biologically inspired engineering.

Ingber's pioneering scientific work led to the discovery that a universal set of building rules based on tensegrity architecture guides the design of organic structures—from simple carbon compounds to complex cells and tissues—as described in his Scientific American article entitled "The Architecture of Life". Tensegrity was first described by Buckminster Fuller and the sculptor Kenneth Snelson; it describes structures that stabilize themselves mechanically by balancing local compression with continuous tension. In addition to his theoretical work, Ingber devised novel methods and carried out numerous experiments which showed that mechanical forces, such as tension and compression, play a fundamental role in control of tissue development and disease, and that the use of tensegrity by cells enables them to carry out mechanotransduction— the process by which cells sense mechanical forces applied to surface molecules, such as integrin receptors, and respond by altering their intracellular biochemistry and gene expression.