About Us

Patrick Stayton currently serves as the Washington Research Foundation Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Washington. He received his B.S. in Biology (summa cum laude) from Illinois State University, his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Illinois, and was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, also at the University of Illinois. Stayton has been elected as a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and has been the recipient of the Clemson Award from the Society For Biomaterials and the CRS-Cygnus Recognition Award from the Controlled Release Society. He served as Co-Chair of the Gordon Conference on Drug Carriers in Medicine and Biology in 2010. He has also been awarded the 2009 UW College of Engineering Faculty Research Innovation Award, and a Distinguished Teacher and Mentor Award from the Department of Bioengineering.

Stayton's eclectic research group works at the interface of molecular science and applied molecular bioengineering in the drug delivery, diagnostics, and regenerative medicine fields. Stayton has a strong interest in translational research; he has been awarded several patents and is a co-founder of the startup companies PhaseRx Inc., based on his group's drug delivery work, and Nexgenia, based on the lab's diagnostic work.

Stayton was named director of the Molecular Engineering and Sciences Institute in October 2011.

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Alshakim (Al) Nelson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004, where he worked with Sir J. Fraser Stoddart on carbohydrate-containing polymers and macrocycles. He was then an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology working for Professor Robert Grubbs on olefin metathesis catalysts for the formation of supramolecular ensembles. Dr. Nelson joined IBM Almaden Research Center in 2005 as a Research Staff Member where he focused on the synthesis of nanomaterial building blocks that enabled large area nanomanufacturing via self-assembly. In 2015, Dr. Nelson joined the faculty at the UW, where his research group focuses on the synthesis, characterization, and processing of stimuli-responsive hydrogels for 3D printing. Dr. Nelson has over 40 publications and 11 issued patents. His honors and awards include: IBM Master Inventor, ACS PMSE Young Investigator, Kavli Foundation Fellow, NSF CAREER award, and 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award.