About the series
On behalf of the NSF Directorate for Engineering, please join us on Wednesday, April 3, 2019 for a Distinguished Lecture by Dr. Rebecca Richards-Kortum of Rice University. Her lecture is titled "Integrating engineering education and research to develop tools that reduce domestic and global health inequities."
Visitor registration
NSF asks visitors to register in advance. Please contact Brian Gray by April 2, 2019, and see important NSF visitor information -- including identification requirements -- at Visit NSF.
Speaker biography
Richards-Kortum is the Malcolm Gillis University Professor and a member of the department of bioengineering at Rice University. She is also the director of the Rice 360° Institute for Global Health and serves as the special advisor to the provost on health-related research and educational initiatives.
Richards-Kortum’s research has been instrumental in improving early detection of cancers and other diseases, especially in low-resource settings. Her Optical Spectroscopy and Imaging Laboratory integrates advances in nanotechnology and molecular imaging with microfabrication technologies to develop optical imaging systems that are inexpensive, portable, and provide point-of-care diagnosis. Her research has led to the development of 40 patents.
She is author of the textbook Biomedical Engineering for Global Health, more than 230 refereed research papers, and 11 book chapters. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors, and numerous other organizations.
In 2008, she was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor and subsequently received a grant for the undergraduate global health program at Rice. This program won the Science Prize for Inquiry-Based Instruction from Science magazine and the Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation. In 2016, the American Institute for Medical and Biomedical Engineering (AIMBE) presented its highest honor, the Pierre Galletti Award, to Richards-Kortum and the MacArthur Foundation awarded her one of its esteemed fellowships.
