This award recognizes an individual who is distinguished by the teaching and training of toxicologists and who has made significant contributions to education in the broad field of toxicology.
Bevin Page Engelward, ScD, has received the 2023 SOT Education Award as an outstanding educator for her leadership in the lab, classroom, and the field through her work with Superfund Research Program (SRP).
Dr. Engelward holds an ScD degree from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she also completed a postdoctoral fellowship before joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an Assistant Professor in 1997. Currently, she serves as Professor in the MIT Department of Biological Engineering, a position she has held since 2014, and as the Director of the MIT SRP.
As an example of her interdisciplinary approach to teaching and training, Dr. Engelward serves as a mentor to the SRP trainees. The students learn about specific Superfund Sites, the chemical contamination problems associated with those sites, and the ways that researchers are helping to find solutions to these important public health challenges. Students learn about the value, importance, and challenges associated with interdisciplinary collaborations, as well as strategies for communicating across disciplines more effectively. Also folded into the curriculum are trainee workshops that focus on a wide array of topics, including (1) how to write a research manuscript, (2) the importance of communicating to the public in lay language, and (3) strategies for shaping a career around one’s passions.
At MIT, the students evaluate their professors and their coursework on a 1–7 scale. Dr. Engelward scores a 6.4–6.8 on average in this competitive ranking system. One of her key accomplishments is that she has brought her research, along with fundamental concepts in toxicology, directly to the classroom. In one of her courses, students do hands-on experiments that mirror those that are ongoing in Dr. Engelward’s laboratory and use cutting-edge technology developed in her lab. In the words of her students, Dr. Engelward has the “ability to blend basic science with public health and community needs, including in the examples she used in teaching...” and offers “great insights into many facets of genome stability covering a breadth of medical applications, public health interventions, and more! She offers a great combination of technical lectures and discussions.” As a lecturer, Dr. Engelward is in high demand, having delivered over 150 presentations thus far in her career.
Dr. Engelward has mentored and educated more than 40 graduate students and postdoctoral trainees over the past 25 years at MIT. Many of her students are now embarking on or leading successful careers in toxicology and the life sciences.
Dr. Engelward’s research includes studies of the relationship between DNA repair and disease susceptibility; the creation of genetically engineered mice for studying exposure-induced mutations in vivo; and the creation of novel high-throughput platforms for measuring DNA damage, DNA repair, and cytotoxicity in human cells. Dr. Engelward also is a co-inventor on two US patents: “Systems and Methods for Volumetric Tissue Scanning Microscopy” and “CometChip: Electrophoresis of Arrayed Cells for Analysis of DNA Damage and Repair.”
Dr. Engelward is an SOT member and has served as an SOT Scientific Session Chair. She is a Past President of the Environmental Mutagenesis and Genomics Society.
To view all the 2023 Award recipients, visit the SOT website or read the SOT Awards Program PDF.
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