Dr. Sefton is University Professor and Michael E. Charles Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry and the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto. He is regarded as a pioneer in tissue engineering and a leader in biomaterials, biomedical engineering and regenerative medicine. He was the first to recognize the importance of combining living cells with synthetic polymers to create “artificial” organs and tissues. He was Director of the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto from 1999-2005 and President of the US Society for Biomaterials in 2006. Dr Sefton is currently Executive Director of Medicine by Design, http://mbd.utoronto.ca/. He has degrees in Chemical Engineering from the University of Toronto (1971) and MIT (1974) and has been at the University of Toronto since 1974.
He has received the the Acta Biomaterialia Gold award in 2011 and the Terumo Global Science prize in 2016 (among others). He was elected an international member of the US National Academy of Medicine in 2014 and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2018.