Celeste Nelson has been given the Mid-Career Award from the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), the largest and fastest growing professional organization for bioengineers.

Nelson, a professor of chemical and biological engineering and the director of the Program in Engineering Biology at Princeton, studies the changing structures of animal tissues as they grow and develop into organs, with special attention to the systems that control that development. Her work has made significant impacts on the fundamental understanding of how tissues build themselves, as well as on treatments for a range of diseases, including cancer.

She has been recognized throughout her career for excellence in both teaching and research. In 2016, Nelson became a Faculty Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and in that same year, Princeton honored her with the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching. She is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Packard Fellowship and the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award.

The Mid-Career Award was newly created in 2018 to honor a researcher who has shown "energetic leadership" in biomedical scholarship, education and practice. BMES was founded in 1968 and currently includes more than 7,000 members.

Nelson joined the Princeton faculty in 2007 after a postdoctoral fellowship at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is an associated faculty member in the Department of Molecular Biology and a member of the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey's Breast Cancer Research and Cancer Metabolism and Growth Programs.