Dr. Silvia Muro Wins Clark School's Junior Faculty Outstanding Research Award

Professor recognized for innovations in drug delivery systems.

Please join us in congratulating Associate Professor Silvia Muro (Institute for Bioscience & Biotechnology Research and Fischell Department of Bioengineering), recipient of the University of Maryland A. James Clark School of Engineering's 2012 Junior Faculty Outstanding Research Award, given in recognition of exceptionally influential research.

Dr. Muro, the only molecular and cell biologist in the Fischell Department of Bioengineering, has established herself as an innovator in the field of targeted therapeutic and drug delivery, particularly for the treatment of rare lysosomal diseases such as Fabry, Pompe, and Niemann-Pick. Muro and her group members have won numerous grants and awards for their work, including a $1.72 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 grant to develop new treatments for genetic diseases affecting lungs and brain; the Controlled Release Society's.

 2011 Outstanding Consumer and Diversified Products Paper Award for the design of safe, efficient and noninvasive strategies to transport drugs across the blood/brain barrier; and the 2010 University of Maryland Life Sciences Invention of the Year award and first place in the 2012 Professor Venture Fair for the development of a novel drug delivery strategy that uses targeted carriers capable of crossing the gastrointestinal epithelium via natural vesicular transport mechanisms. She has published close to 50 high quality manuscripts in top-tier journals.

The members of her research group have also received numerous accolades, including best paper and best poster awards, graduate research awards, and articles featured on the covers of high-impact publications.

Prior to joining the Clark School and the Institute for Bioscience & Biotechnology Research (IBBR), Muro's efforts to understand diseases such as propionic acidemia, a life-threatening metabolic disorder affecting newborns, led to the world’s first genetic pre-natal diagnosis and multiple awards from the European and Spanish Societies for the Study of Inborn Errors of Metabolism.