BIOE professor to lead medical outreach

By Matthew Anaya     3/9/16 7:35pm

Rebecca Richards-Kortum, professor of bioengineering and electrical and computer engineering, has been appointed special adviser to the Rice University Provost Marie Lynn Miranda on health-related research and educational initiatives. Miranda, who is also a professor of statistics, announced the appointment on Feb. 23.

According to Richards-Kortum, this new role will allow her to serve as an ambassador from Rice to the Texas Medical Center in order to strengthen communications between the two institutions.

“I will help develop strategies for Rice to increase the number of health-related collaborative research and educational programs that involve Rice faculty and students together with those in the Texas Medical Center,” Richards-Kortum said.

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Richards-Kortum, who established the Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health in 2007, said that her own research and teaching programs already involve many collaborations with the TMC.

“This will be an exciting opportunity to think more broadly about how to help extend my own collaborations with the Texas Medical Center across the whole university,” Richards-Kortum said.

Richards-Kortum’s research has focused on developing inexpensive and portable optical imaging systems as well as low-cost sensors in order to improve the diagnoses of cancers and other diseases, especially in impoverished areas.

She recently received national recognition for her research in the Feb. 22 edition of the New York Times, which included an article about the variations between different drops of blood obtained from a single fingerprick. The research, published in the American Journal of Clinical Pathology, is especially pertinent due to the proliferation of technologies utilizing increasingly small blood samples for diagnostic purposes. These technologies are often helpful in low-resource environments where people may not be trained in drawing blood.

Richard-Kortums showed there are variations between different drops of blood from single fingerpricks, including in platelet count and hemoglobin, which may call into question the accuracy of some diagnostic point-of-care technologies.

Richards-Kortum said she is planning meetings with faculty and students in order to identify needs and priorities for collaboration between Rice and the TMC.

“My goal is to engage students and faculty across campus to help develop strategies that increase collaboration broadly,” Richards-Kortum said.

Richards-Kortum also said her new position will lead to the development of new opportunities for Rice students.

“Specifically for students, I hope we can improve opportunities to take advantage of courses and research experiences in the Texas Medical Center,” Richards-Kortum said.

Richards-Kortum was inducted as a member of the National Academy of Sciences last year and joined the National Academy of Engineering in 2008.

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