​Innovation grows from curiosity. It requires the ability to identify an important challenge, and the energy and passion to return to it again and again.

​Georges Belfort, Ph.D., and Steven Cramer, Ph.D., both Institute Professors of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), exemplify innovation. When the biotechnology industry was rapidly growing, they identified where their research could help improve downstream bioprocessing—a necessary step in separating and purifying biomanufactured products, like biopharmaceuticals. In the four decades since, they have pushed frontiers through their teaching and research, and have become leading experts in this field.

​It is because of their combined impact that, together, they received the 2025 Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education, the most prestigious award for education that is given by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). The award, according to the NAE, recognizes “new modalities and experiments in education that develop effective engineering leaders.”

​"I am thrilled with the news that two of RPI’s most innovative educators and researchers have been recognized by the NAE. RPI’s focus on human health, precision medicine, and biotechnology is squarely aligned with the work of Georges and Steve,” said Shekhar Garde, Ph.D., the Thomas R. Farino Jr. ’67 and Patricia E. Farino Dean of RPI’s School of Engineering. “They are driven and fearless in their work, and both have a knack for thinking outside the box and constantly generating creative ideas.”

​Combined, Belfort and Cramer have educated and mentored nearly 200 current and former doctoral and postdoctoral students. Both professors proudly recite where those former students now work. Most are at top biopharmaceutical companies across the globe, and many are in positions of leadership, ranging from chief technology officers and senior vice presidents, to global heads and founders of their own companies.

​“Georges and Steve received this award for developing innovative educational programming at RPI that has created many industry leaders.” said Garde. “In fact, what separates them from the rest is their unique ability to combine the fundamental, theoretical, and computational with practical industrial applications that have massive impact.”

​While their research is wide-ranging, Belfort’s expertise in membrane filtration and Cramer’s in chromatography have made them well-known within the bioprocessing industry.

​“My initial thought always is: work on problems that other people are not working on,” said Belfort. “To find problems that are important. Important for progress and important for humankind.”

​“My group, in the past 40 years, has developed a lot of the techniques, models, and process development tools which have helped to advance this space. It’s really gratifying,” said Cramer.

​Belfort and Cramer’s level of expertise, the advances they have made, and their international visibility have attracted brilliant doctoral students to RPI from around the world, from top schools, and from industry.

​“Membranes and chromatography are two huge unit operations that are used throughout the industry and you realize their fingerprints are on the very foundation of the industry itself,” said David Wood, Ph.D. ’00, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at The Ohio State University, and co-founder and CSO of Protein Capture Science LLC. “It’s evident when you look at how their former students have become leaders in the field.”

​Wood worked in industry for several years before he earned his doctorate at RPI. One day, while working at a biopharmaceutical manufacturing company, he came across a paper from Belfort’s research group that validated a new approach he and his team developed. Fast forward a few years, and Wood was working alongside Belfort and his wife Marlene Belfort, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Sciences at the University at Albany. The three collaborated on using protein elements known as inteins for bioseparation. That work has since driven Wood’s research and inspired a company he co-founded.

​Wood said he gained foundational knowledge at RPI in Belfort and Cramer’s classes, made research breakthroughs, and deepened his understanding of industry. Additionally, the networking that Belfort facilitated changed his career.

​“There are things that he taught me that I draw on, but a lot of it was just the people he introduced me to and the network that he created for me,” Wood said. “That has allowed me to enter the field. I didn’t have to fight my way in, he kind of ushered me in.”

​He is reminded of that network each time he attends a professional conference and reconnects with RPI alumni and alumnae who work across the biotechnology field.

​“You realize you’re part of this real community within the community,” Wood said.

​Nihal Tugcu, Ph.D. ’02, is a global head working on mammalian platform process development and clinical manufacturing for Sanofi. She joined the Cramer lab after earning her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in Turkey. Cramer has been a trusted mentor, Tugcu said, ever since.

“He has a skill to question,” Tugcu said. “If something is fishy, he starts asking questions which makes you start thinking in a way that you haven’t thought before.”

​Cramer empowered her and other students to develop their own ideas and proposals, Tugcu said, which deepened their research. He created an environment where students were encouraged to be inquisitive and approach problems in new ways.

​Tugcu said she brings that type of innovative thinking to her current position. She doesn’t dismiss questions that arise, but, instead, follows them.

​“He always would say, ‘no, it is fishy,’ and I still do that. If something is not lining up, I am like, ‘it is fishy, so I should look into this,’” Tugcu said.

​Cramer said his favorite role is that of mentor. By getting to know each student as a person and a researcher, he encourages them to trust their intuition, diligently present their findings, and think at a higher level. ​

​“I try to, by all that interpersonal interaction, have them learn the process of being creative, and being intense, and being rigorous. I really value creativity,” said Cramer, who is also a jazz musician.

​That creativity has helped Cramer’s lab make significant contributions to the field of chromatography—a powerful separation technique, he said, for biological drugs. In the chromatography process, fluids are pushed through a column where their molecules are separated either by selectively binding to material within the system or by passing through.

​Cramer’s lab uses experiments, imaging, physics-based modeling, and molecular dynamic simulations enabled by machine learning to evaluate the effectiveness of novel materials and processes to develop new materials that will selectively bind to certain proteins and not others. To help with that effort, the research group developed a high throughput screening method to efficiently evaluate materials and systems. Cramer’s lab also works on downstream bioprocessing projects related to gene therapy and mRNA.

​Belfort entered the bioprocessing research space after he was inspired by a professor he studied with as an undergraduate. That professor made him excited about mass transfer diffusion—a central part of his research.

​Belfort’s work focuses on how fundamental concepts can solve practical challenges, from improving molecular and membrane separation for purifying biopharmaceutical drugs and mRNA vaccines, to the study of diseases like Alzheimer’s. His lab uses experimental and theoretical expertise, including a high throughput method it developed, to evaluate various membranes.

​When a fluid passes through a membrane, the membrane acts a bit like a coffee filter, holding some molecules back while others pass through. Belfort’s lab develops ways to improve that technology, by changing the shape and structure of the membrane, changing fluid flow, or adding binding molecules to the membrane surface.

​“My interest is deeply fundamental and also applied,” Belfort said. “I care about how we take fundamental work and make it useful for society. It’s not good enough just to solve a fundamental problem, because I’m an engineer, and engineers need to also worry about what they are doing that has relevance to the general society.”

​Belfort is a member of the NAE, a foreign member of the Academy of Sciences of the Institute of Bologna, and was named one of the “100 Chemical Engineers of the Modern Era” during the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Centennial Celebration. Belfort chairs the managing board of the Society for Biological Engineering, has served on several scientific advisory boards—including at the Alexander Grass Center for Bioengineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he serves currently—and is the co-founder and past president of the North American Membrane Society (NAMS). Belfort earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Cape Town, and a master’s degree and doctorate in engineering from the University of California, Irvine.

​He has received several awards including the 2017 Food, Pharmaceutical, and Bioengineering Division Distinguished Service Award in Chemical Engineering from the AIChE, the 2014 Alan S. Michaels Award for Innovation in Membrane Science and Technology from NAMS, the 2008 E.V. Murphree Award in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry from the American Chemical Society (ACS), the 2000 Clarence G. Gerhold Award from AIChE, and the 1995 National ACS Award in Separations Science and Technology. He and his wife funded the Life at the Interface of Science and Engineering Lecture Series which has hosted several Nobel Prize-winning scientists.

​“My wife and I decided our collaboration should be memorialized in a lecture series that emphasizes the idea that you can learn from each other,” Belfort said.

​Cramer is also a member of the NAE. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the AIChE, the ACS, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Cramer was editor-in-chief of the international journal Separation Science and Technology for 20 years. ​​​

​He has received several awards including the 2016 National ACS Award in Separations Science and Technology, the 2006 Alan S. Michaels Award from the ACS Division of Biochemical Technology, the 2023 Gaden Award from the Biotechnology and Bioengineering journal, the 2019 William H. Wiley 1866 Distinguished Faculty Award from RPI, and the 2015 Outstanding Professor Award from RPI’s School of Engineering. Cramer earned a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from Brown University and a master’s degree and doctorate in chemical engineering from Yale University.​

​Both Belfort and Cramer have numerous patents, publications in peer-reviewed journals, research grants, industrial and academic partnerships, and they consult and collaborate with leading biotechnology companies.​

​Their leadership and expertise build on RPI’s Department of Chemical Engineering’s longstanding history of innovation, Garde said. The first chemical engineering class at RPI was offered in the 1913-1914 school year. The initial mission, according to former RPI President Palmer C. Ricketts in his book: History of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 1824-1934, was to better prepare students for “…the management of industrial plants than would any of the engineering courses or the course in science already established.”

​When, decades later, scientific breakthroughs revealed more about human biology, those same chemical engineers were particularly well-suited to tackle emerging challenges, Garde said, from making biopharmaceutical drugs, to purifying them, to delivering them as treatment.

​“The principles that chemical engineers applied to design and build chemical processes to make new molecules, in a sense, translate to a biological or a human cell,” Garde said.

​Around this same time, Howard P. Isermann ’42, who the Department of Chemical Engineering is now named after, invested in the future of chemical engineering at RPI by providing an endowment for the department to support professorships and graduate fellowships. These fellowships, Garde said, gave researchers freedom to explore new ideas, and helped transform the department into a modern center of chemical and biological engineering. The department is now home to three elected members of the NAE: Belfort, Cramer, and Jonathan Dordick, Ph.D., vice president for strategic alliances and translation, and Institute Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at RPI.

​“It was a new class of chemical engineers who saw biological engineering and biotechnology as a new playground for them to discover and do great things,” Garde said. “The results are impressive.”

​That group of chemical engineers is part of the larger team that Belfort and Cramer collaborate with across their department, throughout campus, and within The Shirley Ann Jackson, Ph.D. Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS) at RPI. Both professors are quick to give credit to their colleagues, and the current and former students who have contributed to their labs’ progress.

​“When you put that all together, there’s a strength in the bioprocessing space that really just doesn’t exist elsewhere,” Cramer said.

​Looking back on Belfort and Cramer’s careers so far, it’s easy to see the impact of their innovation. Even with the advancements they’ve made, their energy has not diminished.

​“I hope I can continue to educate several more generations of students that can have a massive impact,” said Cramer. “I really want to contribute to that effort both to bring the new medicines on board and make the existing medicines accessible to the whole world.”

​“Continuing this kind of work that we’ve set a standard for—Cramer and I—will benefit biotech and that will benefit people and society,” Belfort said.

​The Gordon Award honors that work and underscores the importance of continuing it into the future. Efforts to do that are already underway at RPI where, on a sunny March afternoon, doctoral students modify membranes in the lab or prepare samples to evaluate how various materials will bind. Up the hall, other researchers lay out equations or build models that will predict how various molecules will behave. Not far from there, doctoral students answer questions from an inquisitive Belfort or Cramer, who encourage those students to dig deeper in their ownquest for innovation. Innovation that could contribute to the next several decades of bioprocessing technology and, in turn, human health.

​“When you imagine the next technological revolution, I think biomolecular engineering and human health are going to be an important part of it,” said Garde. “Belfort and Cramer really have created a foundation for RPI to lead and to be an exciting part of the next technological revolution.”

​Belfort and Cramer will be honored at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, April 16, 2025, at a special ceremony by the NAE held in the Howard P. Isermann Auditorium in CBIS.