David Gracias is a Professor at the Johns Hopkins University with a primary appointment in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the Whiting School of Engineering and secondary appointments in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Gracias received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and did post-doctoral research at Harvard University before starting his independent laboratory at JHU.

Gracias has made pioneering contributions to micro and nanotechnology as described in over 200 technical publications, including several in high-impact journals such as Science, PNAS, Nature-X, Science-X. He is also a prolific inventor and holds 36 issued U.S. patents, with notable inventions on microchip back-end integration, self-folding polyhedra, curved and folded biosensors, thermoresponsive and DNA programmable soft-robots, and untethered microgrippers and microinjectors. Several of these patents have been put into commercial practice and his engineering translational efforts include co-founding a start-up that was later acquired. Gracias has been recognized by several national and international awards (including the NSF Career, NIH Director’s New Innovator, Beckman Young Investigator, Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar, and the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award) and elected as a Fellow of diverse international scientific and engineering societies, including AAAS, IEEE, APS, RSC, and AIMBE.