ABOVE: COURTESY OF LUIS ALVAREZ
When Luis Alvarez was about 11 years old, he accidentally lit a tree on fire while heating up pool chemicals. His interest in science persisted after that mishap, and he earned a master’s in chemical engineering from MIT in 1999. But it wasn’t until his service as a military intelligence officer in the US Army in Iraq that Alvarez realized he wanted to focus on developing treatments to spur tissue regeneration.
“Many of the people I was serving with were having severe injuries and coming back to the States, [and] having delayed amputations [and] other complications that were all related to the inability of modern medicine to correct tissue defects or to regenerate tissues,” he says. When he returned from Iraq, he went back to MIT with the aim of finding ways to better treat such patients.
Working with Linda Griffith of MIT’s biological engineering ...
