Anthony Atala has been awarded the first annual 2011 Innovation in Nonwovens Award for his work using nonwoven scaffolds for regenerative medicine. The award, which recognizes companies, universities or organizations that are moving the nonwovens industry forward and changing the world through innovation, is sponsored by TAPPI’s Nonwovens Engineers and Technologists (NET) Division. 

The award will be presented during the Innovation Keynote Session at the upcoming 2011 NETInc Conference, September 13-15, 2011, in Atlanta. During the presentation, Atala will discuss his work and also provide his view of the future of nonwovens in the medical arena.

Atala is director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine and the W.H. Boyce Professor and Chair of Urology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina. His team engineered the first lab-grown organ to be implanted into a human—a bladder—and is developing experimental fabrication technology to “print” human tissue on demand. He was number 71 on Fast Company magazine’s Top 100 Most Creative People in Business, and has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey show.