04/09/2026
A physicist at the University of Texas at El Paso has been recognized on two major fronts this year, a prestigious international science award and a breakthrough cancer research publication, and both milestones point toward the same goal: finding better, smarter ways to fight cancer.
Prof. Ahmed El-Gendy has been awarded the 2026 Marie Curie Medal Award in Cancer Nanomedicine by the International Association of Advanced Materials (IAAM), Sweden. The award is named after Marie Curie, the pioneering scientist who won two Nobel Prizes and spent her life using science to help people, and it is one of the most respected honors in the advanced materials field. It follows the 2024 IAAM Advanced Materials Award that Prof. El-Gendy received just two years ago, making him one of the few researchers to receive back-to-back IAAM distinctions. "None of this would have been possible without the incredible dedication of my students and collaborators who bring this science to life every day, and without the generous support of UTEP, NSF, CPRIT, and AFOSR," Prof. El-Gendy said. " To be recognized in the spirit of Marie Curie, a scientist who broke barriers and never stopped asking the hardest questions, is a deeply personal honor that makes me even more committed to doing research that actually matters for people."
What makes this recognition especially timely is that Prof. El-Gendy's team has just published a paper in Acta Biomaterialia, one of the top journals in the world for biomedical materials research, that may genuinely change how doctors treat solid tumors in the future. The idea behind the research is surprisingly intuitive: instead of using heat to kill cancer cells, which is what most current approaches try to do, his team uses tiny magnetic particles, so small they can fit inside a cancer cell, and then applies a low-frequency magnetic field that makes those particles rotate and vibrate. That physical motion tears the cancer cell apart from the inside. No heat. No risk of accidentally damaging healthy cells nearby. "We are moving from heat to force, and that changes everything in terms of what is possible clinically." Prof. El-Gendy said.
