Honored to receive the Simon Ramo Founders Award from my colleagues at @theNAEng. As I said in my remarks, which you can read in full below, engineers are more important now than ever. Thank you again for this recognition. "When I began my career, the idea that biology and engineering could fuse to form a new field was nascent. In fact, I was one of the first PhD’s to graduate from MIT with a degree in biochemical engineering. But extending the principles of engineering to biology is the logical next step in a long-running pattern. Over the last century or so, we’ve learned the rules of disciplines from chemistry to physics and can increasingly engineer the outcomes we want, rather than trying to blindly produce them through trial and error. I’ve spent my career trying to make that true for biology, too – and with new AI tools I’m confident we will make more progress on it in the next four years than we have in the last 40. At its root, I see engineering as a belief that humans can exert our agency on the world and shape it to our needs and desires. It’s an expression of optimism that the world can be better, and that we can make it so. There’s a quote attributed to Simon Ramo, the namesake of this award and a founder of the NAE, that I think sums up the engineer’s optimism. A rocket he was testing lifted 6 inches off the launchpad and immediately exploded. He looked to his team and said, “Now we know it can fly, all we need to do is improve its range a little bit.” That’s the spirit of the engineer, whether in aeronautics or biology, and it’s the spirit that continues to animate this Academy and its work. It’s a reason to look to the future with hope, no matter what challenges may come. Engineers have for generations built our future, and we are needed more than ever. Thank you again for this honor.”