Essential Solutions and Technologies to Eliminate Preventable Newborn Death in Africa
Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman Memorial Lectureship
"Essential Solutions and Technologies to Eliminate Preventable Newborn Death in Africa"
Rebecca Richards-Kortum
Malcolm Gillis University Professor
Rice University Department of Bioengineering
Director, Rice 360° Institute for Global Health
Founder, Beyond Traditional Borders
2016 MacArthur Fellow
Rebecca Richards-Kortum is the Malcolm Gillis University Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University. Her work is guided by the belief that all of the world's people deserve access to health innovation and her research and teaching focus on the development of low-cost, high-performance technologies for remote and low-resource settings. She is widely known for providing vulnerable populations with access to life-saving health technologies that address diseases and conditions that cause high morbidity and mortality, such as cervical and oral cancer, premature birth, sickle cell disease and malaria. In July 2017, for example, the MacArthur Foundation named an international team of collaborators led by Professor Richards-Kortum a finalist for its $100 million 100&Change grant competition to end preventable newborn deaths in Africa within 10 years. As part of this plan, Richards-Kortum and her team are developing and implementing Newborn Essential Solutions and Technologies, or NEST 360°, which is an integrated group of 17 lifesaving neonatal technologies that could prevent half of the newborn deaths in Africa.
Professor Richards-Kortum's research and engineering design efforts have led to 40 patents. She is author of the textbook Biomedical Engineering for Global Health, published by Cambridge University Press in 2010, more than 315 archival journal papers, and 13 book chapters. Her teaching programs, research, and collaborations have been supported by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Defense, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Lemelson Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Doris Duke Foundation, Komen Foundation, Whitaker Foundation, and the Virginia and L.E. Simmons Family Foundation.
Professor Richards-Kortum is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering (2008), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2015), and the National Academy of Sciences (2016). She is also an elected member of the American Philosophical Society as well as Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2000), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2008), the Biomedical Engineering Society (2008), the Optical Society of America (2014), and the National Academy of Inventors (2014). She was recipient of the NSF Presidential Young Investigator (1991) and Presidential Faculty Fellow (1992) Awards, named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor (2002), and received the MacArthur Foundation Award (2016). Fortune magazine has named her to its prestigious list of World's 50 Greatest Leaders.
In 2006, she established and expanded the HHMI undergraduate education program Beyond Traditional Borders. This program was chosen as a model program in 2012 by Science magazine and awarded the Science Prize for Inquiry-Based Instruction; in 2013, this hands-on engineering education program was awarded the Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation for bringing life-saving health solutions to the developing world.
Tuesday, February 27 • 4 p.m.
Yale British Art Museum Auditorium
Hosted by the Department of Biomedical Engineering