Jonathan Rivnay Receives Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists

Northwestern Engineering’s Jonathan Rivnay was named the National Laureate in Physical Sciences and Engineering for the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists, an achievement only awarded to one previous Northwestern professor. 

The Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences announced three laureate winners during the Blavatnik Awards ceremony at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The three laureates will receive $250,000, the largest unrestricted scientific award available to early-career scientists in the US. The remaining 15 finalists will receive $15,000. 

Just 18 finalists and laureates, age 42 or younger, were selected from 372 nominees representing 187 academic and research institutions across 43 states and Washington, DC.

“I’m humbled to be recognized alongside so many outstanding finalists doing such impactful work,” Rivnay said. “This recognition really reflects the efforts of an amazing team—both past and present—whose ideas, dedication, and creativity have made our work possible.”

The Blavatnik Award recognized Rivnay for his work with bioelectronics and new class of “living pharmacies.” These implantable devices cover a wide range of capabilities including advancements in personalized treatments for diabetes, ovarian cancer and sleep disorders.

Rivnay is the Jerome B. Cohen Professor in Engineering and professor of biomedical engineering and materials science and engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering, where he has been a member of Northwestern’s faculty since 2017.

Rivnay’s work centers around soft electronics to communicate with the body, and materials that mimic how biological systems send messages. His research also combines electronic materials with living tissues to create devices that can make and release medicine directly into patients, potentially personalizing medical approaches and ensuring treatments are correctly administered, even after the hospital or doctor’s visit ends.

As part of a large Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) funded project, Rivnay currently is exploring and developing biohybrid devices to produce native biologic drugs that can deliver personalized immunotherapy to ovarian cancer patients. In a parallel effort, they are developing a living pharmacy to provide digital prescriptions to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity. These efforts have required Rivnay and his team to create a device that can split water to produce oxygen, keeping transplanted cells alive for durable cell therapy.

This year, Rivnay is launching the Living Electronics Initiative at Northwestern.

“The intersection of electronics and engineered biology creates a tremendous opportunity to build technologies that can sense, respond, and work with biology in entirely new ways,” Rivnay noted, adding that there is broad applicability across medicine sensing and therapy, robotics, manufacturing and the environment.

Among his many honors, Rivnay has received the Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation, the US Office for Naval Research Young Investigator Program Award, was a 2025 American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Fellow, and was a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher from 2023-2025.

William Dichtel, the Robert L. Letsinger Professor of Chemistry at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, received the Blavatnik National Award in Chemistry in 2020. Six other Northwestern faculty have previously been named finalists.