UW Medicine Inventor of the Year Award

Celebrating UW Medicine Faculty's Innovative Contributions to Healthcare

The UW Medicine Inventor of the Year award honors outstanding UW scientists whose inventions have had a major effect on both human health and our local economy. Each year, the Inventor of the Year selection committee solicits nominations from department chairs and administrators which are then reviewed based on the following criteria:

inventor of the year
  • Number of lives saved or improved​
  • Biomedical impact of the invention
  • Contribution to the Bioscience sector
  • Contributions to the UW CoMotion mission to extend the impact of University of Washington research through the creation of partnerships that encourage investment in innovation
  • Contributions to the UW School of Medicine faculty community

2026 Award Winner - Jeffrey Chamberlain, PhD

Jeffrey Chamberlain, PhD received his PhD in Biochemistry in 1985 at the University of Washington working under Stephen Hauschka, and did postdoctoral training with Tom Caskey at Baylor College of Medicine before starting his first lab in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Michigan.

He is currently a Professor in the Department of Neurology and the Department of Medicine Division of Medical Genetics, the director of the Wellstone Muscular Dystrophy Specialized Research Center, and the McCaw Endowed Chair in Muscular Dystrophy.

Chamberlain is a past president of the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy (ASGCT; 2023-2024) and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Chamberlain was recently awarded the Outstanding Achievement Award by the ASGCT and received MDA’s Legacy Award in 2024 for his lifetime of work on muscular dystrophy.

Dr. Chamberlain and his group have been studying the muscular dystrophies for more than 40 years. Their research has led to numerous advances and inventions spanning novel technologies, genetic diagnostics and therapeutics. His group’s earliest patent described multiplex PCR and led to commercial applications for prenatal diagnosis and carrier detection of dozens of genetic disorders, including Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), the most common muscular dystrophy.

Later work turned to development of viral vectors that have been licensed by numerous biotech companies for vaccine development and gene therapies. Critical advancements included identifying in 2004 what remains the only efficient way to deliver new genes to muscles body-wide (using AAV vectors), and discovering a way to compress the largest known gene (dystrophin, defective in DMD) for delivery via this approach.

Their group’s discovery of a method to deliver these “micro-dystrophins” to patients using AAV vectors has already been used in more than 1,500 patients worldwide and led to the first FDA approval for a muscle gene therapy drug. The delivery method has also been applied to other neuromuscular disorders such as spinal muscular atrophy and several limb-girdle muscular dystrophies, in which more than 5,000 patents have been successfully treated.

All together Chamberlain is an inventor on more than 35 patents, many of which have been licensed to biotech companies. He was a co-founder of two UW spinout companies, Etubics and KineaBio, and two others outside of Washington. More recently his group has expanded the ability to deliver large genes to muscle and is exploring multiple approaches for gene delivery and gene editing for muscular dystrophies.

We look forward to honoring Dr. Chamberlain at a reception this fall. If you have any questions about the reception or the Inventor of the Year, please reach out to somevent@uw.edu.

Recent Award Winners

Michael Bailey

2025: Michael Bailey, PhD and the Rolling Stones

Dr. Bailey and his team conduct NIH- and NASA-funded research to understand and prevent kidney stones, and invented a noninvasive, sound-wave-based technology that breaks stones through the skin and flushes the fragments out in urine.

2024: Mary "Nora" L. Disis, MD

Dr. Disis’ research is in the development of vaccine and cellular therapy for the treatment and prevention of common malignancies. She holds several patents in the field of cancer immunotherapy and diagnostics.

Ruikang 'Ricky' Wang

2023: Ruikang Wang, PhD

Dr. Wang’s laboratory is responsible for the invention of optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA, or optical micro angiography), an OCT imaging technique capable of 3D imaging of blood flow within microcirculatory tissue beds in vivo.

 

Past Winners

2022: Jay Shendure, MD, PhD
2020: Alexander Greninger, MD, PhD, MS, M.Phil., & Keith Jerome, MD, PhD
2019: Jim Stout, PhD
2018: Thomas S Lendvay, MD
2017: Christy McKinney, PhD, MPH & Michael Cunningham, MD, PhD
2016: Samuel Browd, MD, PhD., Jonathan Posner, PhD
2015: David R. Eyre, PhD
2014: David Russell, MD, PhD
2013: Fred Silverstein, MD
2012: Yongmin Kim, PhD
2011: David Baker, PhD
2010: Roy Martin, PhD
2009:  Bonnie Ramsey, MD, Arnold Smith, MD, Bruce Montgomery, MD
2008: Irwin D. Bernstein, MD
2007: Phillip Green II, PhD
2006: David C. Auth, PhD
2005: Earle W. Davie, PhD
2004: Benjamin Hall, PhD

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