CBE’s Sarah Perry Named the Gary R. Lapidus Faculty Fellow

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Sarah Perry – a professor in the UMass Amherst Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE) Department, an adjunct in Polymer Science and Engineering, and the Undergraduate Program Director in the CBE – has been named as the next Gary R. Lapidus Faculty Fellow in Chemical Engineering. The prestigious fellowship, established in 2021 with a generous gift from alumnus Gary Lapidus, will support Perry for a renewable five-year term. Perry succeeds CBE Professor Jessica Schiffman, who was appointed as the inaugural Lapidus Fellow in 2022.

The purpose of the Lapidus Fellowship is to provide support to a faculty member in the CBE department and may be used for summer stipends, research support, professional travel, or other scholarship and teaching expenses.

The source of the fellowship, the Gary R. Lapidus Faculty Fund, supports faculty excellence in chemical engineering and helps ensure that faculty can “conduct cutting-edge research, involve graduate and undergraduate students in their work, and collaborate with academic and industry peers to address the complex engineering challenges of the 21st century.” Lapidus, after graduating from UMass Amherst and earning advanced degrees at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard Business School, became a senior equity researcher at Goldman Sachs and Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. and a principal with Booz, Allen, and Hamilton.

Perry has amassed a large body of accomplishments in a short time. She has published more than 70 papers in scientific peer-reviewed journals, acquired 6 patents, delivered 168 invited seminar presentations, and together with her group has given nearly 300 contributed presentations. She has also harvested funded research grants and contracts totaling $12,883,000, including $8,130,644 earmarked directly for the Perry lab.

Perry is also a co-founder and Technical Advisory Board Chair of Waterfall Scientific, a startup company aiming to commercialize microfluidic strategies for the continuous manufacture of RNA.

Among numerous awards and honors earned by Perry, she has received the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, the American Chemical Society Macro Letters/Biomacromolecules/Macromolecules Young Investigator Award, the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, and the Young Alumni Achievement Award from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In addition, the Riccio College of Engineering has presented Perry with its Outstanding Teacher Award and the Diversity Student Ally Award, and she was awarded the Jeffrey M. Davis Teaching Award from the CBE department. Perry also serves on the editorial advisory boards for ACS Macro Letters, ChemSystemsChem, and Soft Matter.

Mentoring students is also a significant part of Perry’s approach. During her time at UMassAmherst, eight postdoctoral researchers, 17 Ph.D. students, six M.S. students, 78 undergraduates, and one high school student have worked in her lab. These individuals have also been recognized for their excellence. Their achievements include five Rising Researcher Awards, 14 honors theses, two best-dissertation awards, and innumerable scholarships, fellowships, and other recognitions. They have gone on to pursue graduate studies, careers in industry, started their own companies, and become faculty in their own right.

Perry’s Research Group “utilizes self-assembly, molecular design, and microfluidic technologies to generate biologically relevant microenvironments for the study and application of biomacromolecules. Individually, microfluidics represents an enabling technology for the time-resolved analysis of enzyme-structural dynamics, while control over molecular interactions in self-assembling polyelectrolyte systems can be used to examine the interplay between biomacromolecules and the intracellular environment.”

Perry’s research on self-assembling materials has ranged from fundamental studies to applications, and from next-generation membranes for separation to vaccine formulation. Her efforts in microfluidics include time-resolved structural studies of proteins and the continuous manufacture of RNA.

Perry received B.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering and Chemistry and an M.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Arizona. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign while working on microfluidic platforms for the crystallization and study of membrane protein crystallization. 

Perry began working as a postdoc for UMass Amherst Ph.D. Alum Professor Matthew Tirrell in the Bioengineering Department at the University of California at Berkeley and moved with his lab to the Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. (February 2026)