Dr. Yarmush received BA degrees (summa cum laude) in Biology and Chemistry at Yeshiva University in 1975, and carried out his PhD work in Immunochemistry at The Rockefeller University in the laboratories of Drs. Richard Krause and Thomas Kindt. He spent a postdoctoral year at the NIH in the Laboratory of Immunogenetics before going to Yale University for his MD degree. After three years at Yale, he entered MIT, where he completed all requirements for a PhD degree in Chemical Engineering excluding thesis. In 1984, he joined the MIT Chemical Engineering department as a Principal Research Associate, where he established several interdisciplinary research programs in applied immunology, bioseparations, and tissue engineering. In 1988, Dr. Yarmush was recruited to Rutgers, where he: 1) held the positions of Professor and Deputy Chair of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, 2) founded and directed the New Jersey Center for Biomaterials and Medical Devices, and 3) founded and directed the NIH supported Rutgers-UMDNJ PhD Training Program in Biotechnology. In 1995, he was recruited to Harvard Medical School to fill the Helen Andrus Benedict Chair of Surgery and Bioengineering, and to direct the Center for Engineering in Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital. In 2001, he returned to Rutgers to serve as Chair of Biomedical Engineering, and as the major driver of an engineering-wide renaissance in bioengineering.

Over the last 25 years, Dr. Yarmush has published more than 240 refereed journal articles; has advised and mentored more than 70 postdoctoral fellows and more than 30 graduate students; and has taught a spectrum of courses from molecular genetics and immunology to thermodynamics and transport phenomena.

In addition to his teaching and research achievements, Dr. Yarmush has contributed to the advancement of science and engineering through service as: (1) an Operating Committee member of the MIT Engineering Research Center in Biotechnology Process Engineering; (2) a governing board member of the New Jersey Associated Institutions for Material Science; (3) a member on NIH, NSF, FDA, and Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) review panels and study sections in various areas of biotechnology and bioengineering; (4) an advisory board member for several foundations (including the Whitaker Foundation, Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, and Doris Duke Foundation), academic-based centers, and venture capital firms; 5) an editorial board member of Current Opinion in Biotechnology, Cell Transplantation, Tissue Engineering; editor-in-chief of the Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering; associate editor of Metabolic Engineering and the IEEE Transactions on NanoBioscience; and section editor of Science and Medicine.

A frequent invited speaker at major conferences and symposia, and winner of over 25 local and national awards, Dr. Yarmush is well-known internationally as one of the leading investigators in the area of molecular, cellular, and microsystems bioengineering through seminal contributions to the fields of liver and skin tissue engineering, applied immunology, genomics and proteomics technologies, and metabolic engineering. Dr. Yarmush has been credited with many advances including: microfabricated cell culture systems, bioartificial organs development, targeted therapies for tumors and infections, recombinant protein purification techniques, and recombinant retrovirus production and purification techniques. Many of these developments have resulted in patents and have led to the formation of companies. Dr. Yarmush has also served on the scientific advisory board of several biotechnology and medical device companies.