Five Tufts faculty have been named as senior members of the National Academy of Inventors, an honor for academic inventors who are rising leaders in their respective fields and who have produced technologies that seek to bring a positive impact on society.

The organization recognizes and supports academic inventors and enhances the visibility of academic technology and innovation. 

“This year’s class comes from a multitude of impressive fields and research backgrounds from across the world,” says Paul Sanberg, president of the National Academy of Inventors. “We applaud their pursuit of commercialization to ensure their groundbreaking technologies can make a difference by tackling the world’s most pressing issues, improving quality of life across society, and advancing the economy.”

This year’s senior members from Tufts are Ira Herman, Valencia Koomson, Nikhil Nair, Igor Sokolov, and Sameer Sonkusale. They will be inducted at the NAI annual meeting in June in Atlanta.

“This honor highlights the innovative research being done by our faculty, and the wide-ranging impacts that it has in so many areas,” says Bernard Arulanandam, vice provost for research at Tufts. “Through the groundbreaking research, our new NAI senior members have pioneered innovations in healing wounds, assessing health, treating rare disorders, detecting diseases, quantifying pain, and unlocking countless other advancements in the world of medicine.” 

Ira Herman, professor emeritus in the Department of Developmental, Molecular, and Chemical Biology in the Graduate School of Biomedical Science, is a leader in wound care, regenerative medicine, and the underpinnings of tissue repair. His discoveries and innovations have led to advanced non-invasive diagnostics for assessing wound state and healing trajectory. His insights into patient care for hard-to-heal wounds are expected to significantly impact treatment methods, potentially preventing limb and life loss.

The holder of 12 U.S. patents, Herman and his collaborators created a new class of therapeutic peptides that represent promise for multiple indications regardless of wound type, including scarless wound healing, the mitigation or prevention of radiation-induced dermatitis, hair growth, and scalable skin grafting devices capable of restoring thermally injured skin. An active, funded emeritus faculty member, Herman has been at the center of the creation of several biotech companies in wound diagnostics, therapeutics, and value-based wound care.

Valencia Koomson, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering in the School of Engineering, conducts research at the intersection of biology, medicine, and electrical engineering. The founding director of the Advanced Integrated Circuits and Systems Lab, she conducts pioneering work on micro- and nano-scale electronic circuits, wearables, and health informatics. 

She has particularly focused on addressing health disparities in pulse oximetry, used for blood oxygen assessment, seeking to ensure that pulse oximeters provide reliable, high-precision readings, especially for patients of color. Pulse oximeters are one of the most widely used medical devices in the world to measure blood oxygen levels. Koomson, who holds two U.S. utility patents, is founder of a medical device company seeking to commercialize the oximetry sensor technology developed in her lab.

Nikhil Nair, an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering in the School of Engineering, leads research on basic and applied microbial synthetic and systems biology. His work focuses primarily on altering aspects of microbial physiology, aiming to engineer them for applications related to human health and sustainability. 

Nair’s research spans several areas, including engineering phenylalanine ammonia-lyase enzyme variants to treat phenylketonuria (PKU), a rare genetic disorder; discovering and characterizing a novel protein in Bacillus subtilis spores that can be used for enzyme immobilization, which enables biocatalysis for biomass conversion and renewable chemical biosynthesis; and developing a bioengineered yeast that can feed on a wide range of feedstocks for biofuel production.

Igor Sokolov, a professor of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering, has wide-ranging research interests, from material synthesis and the physics of cancer and aging to the development of new instrumentation, photonic nanomaterials, atomic force microscopy, and machine learning. His pioneering research has advanced the fields of material science and biomedical engineering, with a particular focus on imaging nanoscale material properties and non-invasive, disease detection.

With more than 20 issued and pending U.S. patents, Sokolov has founded six startups, including Cellens with former Tufts graduate student Jean Pham, EG21, where they are developing pioneering diagnostic tests for bladder cancer using multiparametric, single-cell biophysical markers combined with machine learning for noninvasive early detection.

Sameer Sonkusale, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, with joint appointments in biomedical engineering and chemical and biological engineering, does research in bioelectronics, biomedical devices, and nanoscale sensors. His work spans from point-of-care diagnostics and lab-on-chip micro-systems to analog and mixed-signal computing and brain-inspired machine learning.

Sonkusale, who has been awarded 10 U.S. utility patents and has more than 30 pending patents, has developed smart bandages, new methods of quantifying pain, flexible thread-based sensors that can measure movement, microneedles used for low-cost, pain free injections, and a microneedle-based drug delivery system. His team also invented the world’s first microbiome sampling capsule capable of passively sampling from different regions of the gastrointestinal tract, including the small intestine.