Beth Pruitt, a professor of bioengineering and mechanical engineering at UC Santa Barbara, has been selected to receive the 2026 Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering (CMBE) Christopher Jacobs Award for Excellence in Leadership. The annual award commends Pruitt for demonstrating “exceptional leadership in education, service, and publication of knowledge” within the cell and molecular bioengineering community. 

Established in 2019, the award honors the memory and contributions of Christopher Jacobs, co-founder and council member of the CMBE Special Interest Group and a former colleague and mentor of Pruitt’s at Stanford University. 

“Receiving this award means a lot to me personally and professionally,” said Pruitt, who earned a PhD in mechanical engineering and spent 15 years as a faculty member at Stanford University. “Chris was a wonderful colleague and mentor to me when I was a new faculty member at Stanford.”

Pruitt joined the UCSB faculty in 2018 to help build a new bioengineering graduate degree program and served as founding chair of the new Department of Bioengineering until June 2025. Her research explores the biophysics and mechanisms of mechanobiology, the field of science that studies how physical forces and changes in the mechanical processes of cells and tissues influence development, differentiation, and disease. Her lab has developed technologies to enhance maturity in human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hPSC-CMs) and to make quantitative measurements of cell responses to drugs or disease mutations. Pruitt says that Jacobs had a tremendous impact on her academic career. 

“Chris was also a pioneer in my field of mechanobiology, and I still use his textbook as a reference in my course on this subject,” she said. “Like Chris, I have tried to serve as a community builder and to promote the advancement of bioengineering training and dissemination of knowledge. Throughout my career, our lab has been committed to open science and sharing of protocols, tools, and analysis codes, so it always especially gratifying to see our methods adopted by others to advance the field the quantitative mechanobiology.”

Among Pruitt’s prior honors are an Early CAREER Award and a BRITE Fellow Award from the National Science Foundation, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, and election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and BMES. 

Pruitt, the Mehrabian Chancellor’s Chair, will deliver a lecture and be honored at the 2026 BMES CMBE Conference in Puerto Rico next January.