Charles Stark Draper
In 2011 Stemmer was honored with the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the United States' top engineering honor, for the pioneering contributions to directed evolution which won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018. It is a "method used to engineer novel enzymes and biocatalytic processes" for various pharmaceutical and chemical products, allowing researchers to endow proteins and cells with properties that ultimately enable solutions food ingredients, pharmaceuticals, toxicology, agricultural products, and biofuels.