He was named to a list of 23 world-class researchers from institutions in five countries whose work is deemed to be of Nobel class
James J. Collins, Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science, and Professor of Biological Engineering, MIT, and a core faculty member of IMES, was named one of 23 world-class researchers from institutions in five countries as Citation Laureates™. These are researchers whose work is deemed to be of Nobel class, as demonstrated by analysis carried out by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)™ at Clarivate™.
According to the award announcement, this year’s Citation Laureates have made significant contributions across a diverse range of fields, including cancer treatment, human microbiomes, synthetic gene circuits, spintronics, designer molecular structures, sleep/wake cycles, wealth inequality and urban economics. Sixteen of the honorees are based at leading academic institutions in the United States, two each are based in Japan, the United Kingdom and France, and one is based in Germany. These individuals represent an elite group whose research publications are highly cited and who have already exerted a profound and often transformative impact on their fields of research.
Collins, who is also a faculty member in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Science and Technology (HST); a founding faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University; and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, was named to the list in the research area of "pioneering work on synthetic gene circuits, which launched the field of synthetic biology." IMES is HST's home at MIT.
You can read more about the Citation Laureates here. Many Clarivate Citation Laureates (formerly known as Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates) have gone on to become Nobel Prize recipients.