Philadelphia, October XX, 2025 — Three world-renowned scientists whose work has led to extraordinary advancements in combating deadly disease will share the coveted 2025 John Scott Award, created 220 years ago to honor the scientific legacy of Benjamin Franklin.

The 2025 winners are: Dr. Bonnie Bassler,a molecular biologist whose work focuses on “quorum sensing”, a process of cell-to-cell communication that enables bacteria to cause disease; Dr. Robert Prud’homme,a chemical engineer who led the development of processes to improve the effectiveness of disease-fighting drugs, with a special emphasis on drugs that can be distributed in the developing world; and Dr. David Fajgenbaum,an immunologist who repurposed a drug to save his own life and others during medical school and is now pioneering a novel approach utilizing AI to identify new uses for existing medicines.

The Awards, which include the Scott Medal and a cash prize of $10,000 for each of the winners, will be presented in Philadelphia at the American Philosophical Society – founded by Benjamin Franklin – at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 20, 2025.The Award ceremony is hosted by the Board of Directors of City Trusts, which administers the John Scott Trust in addition to 119 other public charitable trusts on behalf of the City of Philadelphia.

“The Scott Award honors the legacy of Benjamin Franklin by recognizing ‘ingenious men and women’ for their contributions to the ‘comfort, welfare, and happiness of mankind,’” said Board President Michael A. Nutter. “The 2025 Scott Award winners fit this description perfectly, and we are delighted to honor them in Dr. Franklin’s memory for their amazing contributions in the fight against human disease.”

Endowed in 1815 by Scottish chemist and pharmacist John Scott, the Scott Award has become one of the most prestigious honors in science. Among the previous awardees are20 winners of the Nobel Prize, including Marie Curie, Guglielmo Marconi, R. Buckminster Fuller, Baruch Blumberg, Kary Mullis, K. Barry Sharpless, and most recently, 2023 Nobel laureates Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman,whose breakthrough mRNA research led to the development of vaccines to fight COVID-19 and other viruses.

Awardee Profiles

Dr. Bonnie L. Bassler

One of the world’s foremost molecular biologists, Dr. Bassler is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the Squibb Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. Her work focuses on bacterial cell-to-cell communication, the molecules that make up bacterial “languages,” and how chemical communication allows bacteria to orchestrate group behaviors including those required for bacteria to cause disease.

“Bacteria have the power to take or give us life, and the question is, how do they get their power given that bacteria are so tiny?” she said. “They communicate with each other, using secreted chemicals. The amount of the chemicals surrounding the bacteria increases as a bacterial population grows in number. When the chemicals accumulate to a threshold amount, the bacteria detect the presence of the chemicals, and they infer from the chemicals that neighboring cells must be present. In response, all of the bacteria change their behavior in unison, and together they carry out tasks that could not be accomplished by a single bacterial cell acting alone.”

The process is known as “quorum sensing.”

“Bacteria have to work together or they can’t accomplish much since, individually, each bacterial cell is too small to make a difference,” Dr. Bassler said. “It takes a quorum. It’s like moving a piano – you can’t do it yourself, but you and your friends can do it together.”

In effect, quorum sensing allows bacteria to function as multi-cellular organisms, and only together do they have the power to cause disease.

“Quorum sensing has utterly changed how we think about bacteria, about health and disease, and the possibilities for new medicines,” Dr. Bassler said.

One of Bassler’s goals is to disrupt quorum sensing to develop new antibiotics. “If we disrupt their collective behaviors by preventing the bacteria from producing or detecting the chemical communications,” said Dr. Bassler, “then the bacteria don’t sense the presence of neighboring cells, which prevents the bacteria from being pathogenic.

A 2002 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship awardee, Dr. Bassler is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the Royal Society, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. She has been awarded the Microbiology Society Prize Medal, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, the Gairdner International Award, the Albany Prize in Biomedical Research, the Gruber Prize in Genetics, the Dickson Prize in Medicine, and Princeton University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. The author of hundreds of publications in her field, Dr. Bassler has served as an editor for multiple scientific journals, and she also serves on grant panels for the National Academies of the Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation, among others. Dr. Bassler holds a B.S. degree in Biochemistry from University of California at Davis, and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Johns Hopkins University.

“It’s an honor to receive an award inspired by Benjamin Franklin,” she said. “He was endlessly creative, a true genius who would be delighted to see all we have learned about the biodiversity that exists on Earth and what it has allowed us to achieve for human health.”

Dr. Robert K. Prud’homme

A truly prolific chemical engineer who holds more than 100 patents, Dr. Prud’homme describes his work as a “passion for translating the science of the lab into technologies and applications that benefit society.”

Over a lifetime of scientific achievement, Dr. Prud’homme is best known for leading a team that invented and refined a mixing process called Flash NanoPrecipitation (FNP), a technology used to advance treatments for malaria, tuberculosis, and certain cancers. More recently, the FNP process has been an essential element in improving the effectiveness of lipid nanoparticles for COVID and other mRNA vaccines. Essentially a nano-precipitation technology, FNP assembles nanoparticles so that they can be delivered in smaller and more cost-effective doses.

In addition, FNP helps preserve the stability of the medicines, which enhances their effectiveness under extreme, global health conditions. As a result, thanks to a 2022 partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, FNP was adapted to demonstrate the production of large-scale health initiatives in Africa and other parts of the developing world to treat malaria and other diseases.

“mRNA is already making huge contributions to the future of science and global health,” Dr. Prud’homme said. “My work has been focused on creating processes to scale mRNA vaccines in global health initiatives, especially those in extreme conditions, so that we can deliver these medicines across the world.

“It’s incredibly satisfying work, and I am proudest of my collaborations that have allowed us to take scientific research and develop solutions that science alone can’t accomplish.”

A member of the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the National Academy of Inventors, the National Academy of Engineers, and the Society of Rheology, Dr. Prud’homme has served on advisory boards for American Cynamid, Dow Chemical Company, and BASF. He has also been involved in the founding of five start-up companies connected to his work and patents, and he has been a professor of chemical engineering at Princeton University since 1978, where he also founded the Program in Engineering Biology – an interdisciplinary program to bring together student in life sciences with students in engineering. Dr. Prud’homme has received numerous awards for his work, including the National Academy of Engineering Award, the AIChE Award for Nanoscale Science and Engineering, and the Thomas Edison Patent Award. A Vietnam veteran, Dr. Prud’homme holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Dr. Prud’homme described himself as “humbled” by the Scott Award’s connections to Benjamin Franklin. “One hundred years from now people will still remember Ben Franklin and they won’t remember me,” he said, “but it is an honor to be mentioned along with so many outstanding scientists who have won the Scott Award over the years.

“I also think that Dr. Franklin would be very interested in the work that we’ve done in FNP,” he said, “which can be traced all the way back to his experiment of pouring olive oil on a pond to see its calming impact on the water as it spread.

“He’d be a welcome partner in the lab,” Prud’homme said.

Dr. David C. Fajgenbaum

Dr. David Fajgenbaum’s renowned research in repurposing drugs to find new cures and save lives lives began as an intensely personal journey. Fifteen years ago, as a 3rd year medical student at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Fajgenbaum was diagnosed with Idiopathic Multicentric Castleman Disease, a rare and extremely deadly condition that is effectively a cross between cancer and an autoimmune disease.

Doctors told him that there was nothing more that could be done for him, a priest was called to give him Last Rites, and his family gathered around him to say goodbye. And right there, on his deathbed, Dr. Fajgenbaum dedicated the rest of his life to finding a cure for his own disease.

“They told me I was out of options and my chances of finding a treatment were about a million to one,” he said. “For about a minute after they told me we all cried our hearts out. But after that first minute what I thought was, ‘One in a million is better than zero in a million.’”

And so began a journey that led him to discover a cure for his own disease just months before it would have killed him. His research led to an existing drug called sirolimus or rapamycin, an immunosuppressant medicine used to prevent organ transplant rejection. He began taking it for his condition, and it worked: Dr. Fajgenbaum has been in remission for “11 and three-quarters years,” he said, acknowledging that he keeps a precise count and appreciates every moment.

The emotional toll of hearing his doctors say that “we’ve tried everything,” and then beginning a journey to discover his own cure, Dr. Fajgenbaum said, “was like walking through the Valley of Death.” But it also activated a passion that continues today, having dedicated his career to unlocking the full potential of existing FDA-approved drugs to treat diseases other than those for which they are indicated.

His success in “chasing my cure” (which is also the title of his best-selling memoir about the experience and the subject of a feature film currently in development) led him to join the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 2015 and advance 13 more repurposed treatments for multiple diseases, saving thousands of lives. In 2022, Dr. Fajgenbaum co-founded a non-profit, Every Cure, devoted to expanding research into repurposing existing medicines for new uses. Key to this work is using AI to effectively scan the world’s knowledge of all drugs and diseases to predict which drugs offer promise for treating new diseases.

“AI helps us to focus in on the most promising repurposing opportunities, and then scientists and docs select the very best ones for further laboratory studies and clinical trials,” he said. “In that sense, what Every Cure does is take what we’ve been doing manually in the lab to find repurposed treatments one disease at a time and scale it to find the most promising repurposed treatments across all diseases.

“The truth is that our system of creating new drugs is extraordinarily impressive but also very expensive and time-consuming,” Fajgenbaum said. “It takes more than a billion dollars and 15 years to create a single new drug, but repurposing one of these drugs for a new disease can be done for less than one percent of the cost and much more quickly. It’s just not profitable to anyone so it’s rarely done.”

A 2025 TIME100 Health and TIME100 Next honoree as one of the world’s most influential young leaders, Dr. Fajgenbaum is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Translational Medicine & Human Genetics and Founding Director of the Center for Cytokine Storm Treatment & Laboratory (CSTL) at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. One of the youngest recipients of multiple top NIH and FDA grants, Dr. Fajgenbaum has authored over 100 scientific papers in leading journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and The Journal of Clinical Investigation. He is also an Emerging Leaders Scholar at the National Academy of Medicine, a member of the Board of Directors of the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA, and a Fellow of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. His honors include the Atlas Award alongside then Vice Presidemt Joe Biden, NDRI Service to Science Award alongside Nobel Laureates Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, the Vision of Hope Award from the Sarcoma Foundation, the Fierce 50 Breakthrough Award from Fierce Pharma, the Judson Daland Prize from the American Philosophical Society, and the Citizen of the Year Award from the Philadelphia Citizen, among others. A former quarterback at Georgetown University, Dr. Fajgenbaum holds a BS degree from Georgetown, a Master’s degree in Public Health from Oxford, an M.D. from Penn as well as a n MBA in Health Care Management from the Wharton School.

Winning the Scott Award, Dr. Fajgenbaum said, is a “tremendous honor, and I’m humbled to join the list of amazing scientists who have won it in years past.” He hopes the recognition “will help us raise awareness and support for our critical work.”

“I cannot believe that I am alive and feel so fortunate to have the opportunity to dedicate every moment to helping to save more lives with existing medicines,” he said. “I am living the total dream.”