Richard C. Willson


Richard Coale Willson is an American chemical engineer, academic, and biotechnology entrepreneur. He is the Huffington–Woestemeyer Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the at the University of Houston, with a joint appointment in the . Willson is also director of the University of Houston . Willson works on biomolecular recognition, bioseparations, and molecular diagnostics. He develops methods of detection and measurement technologies for applications in pharmaceutical manufacturing, process control, and medical diagnostics. Willson has been elected a Fellow of the American Chemical Society, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Wilson is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, and holds appointments in the program of Baylor College of Medicine and at the .
In addition to his academic work, he was a founding member of the Technology Advisory Board of Moderna and served as Chief Technology Officer of VisiGen Biotechnologies.

Education

Willson received B.S. and M.S. degrees in chemical engineering from Caltech in 1981 and 1982, respectively. He moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for doctoral work, advised by Charles L. Cooley and Richard C. Reid, earning a doctorate in 1998. He was then a postdoc with Jonathan King in the .

Academic career

After completing his training, Willson joined the faculty of the University of Houston, where he has established a multidisciplinary research group spanning chemical engineering, molecular biology, and biotechnology. He is the Huffington–Woestemeyer Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, with courtesy appointments in the Department of Biology and Biochemistry and the Department of Biomedical Engineering. At UH Willson has served as director of the University of Houston, Chair of the Faculty Senate Budget & Facilities Committee, interim director of the DHS Center of Excellence, organizer of the “Tier One” institutional transformation initiative, and interim associate Vice President for Technology Transfer at a time when UH had the largest patent royalty income among public, non-medical universities in the US.

Career highlights

  • Luminostics spun out by Andrew Paterson and Bala Raja
  • Organizer, with Jonathan Coffman and Bruno Marques, of the “Highland Games,” an industry-wide benchmarking competition on the prediction of the developability properties of
  • Founding member of the Technology Advisory Board of Moderna
  • Chief Technology Officer of VisiGen Biotechnologies
  • President of the
  • Chair of the Division of Biochemical Technology of the American Chemical Society
  • Founding member of the Technology Advisory Board of Moderna
  • Chief Technology Officer of VisiGen Biotechnologies
  • President of the International Society for Molecular Recognition
  • Chair of the of the American Chemical Society

Awards and honors