Melody Swartz, PhD

Swartz earned her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 1991. As a Watson Foundation Fellow she then conducted a year of independent research in Micronesia on the “use and societal impact of Western technologies in undeveloped nations.”

Swartz next joined the anesthesiology department at the Northwestern University School of Medicine as a research assistant. She completed her PhD in chemical engineering in 1998 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, serving next as a postdoctoral fellow in the Pulmonary Division of Brigham & Women’s Hospital of the Harvard Medical School and of MIT’s department of mechanical engineering.

She later held joint faculty appointments in chemical & biological engineering and biomedical engineering at Northwestern. She joined the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lusanne (EPFL) faculty in 2003 while maintaining her Northwestern ties first as an adjunct assistant professor, then as a visiting scientist, in biomedical engineering.

Swartz has received many honors. In addition to the MacArthur Fellowship, which recognizes creativity in all endeavors, she has been awarded a Career Award from the National Science Foundation, an Arnold and Mabel Beckman Young Investigator Award, and the Wenner Prize—Switzerland’s largest prize for cancer research.

Additional honors include being named one of Popular Science Magazine’s Brilliant 10 in 2006. Swartz also is an elected fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and a two-time recipient of prestigious $3 million single-investigator grants from the European Research Foundation.