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10/1/2008

Rebecca Richards-Kortum receives 2008 IEEE Vice President's Recognition Award
Award honors Rice’s efforts to integrate engineering education with social relevance

BY SHAWN HUTCHINS
Special to the Rice News

Rice bioengineer Rebecca Richards-Kortum is the 2008 recipient of the Vice President's Recognition Award by IEEE, a leading professional association for the advancement of technology. She is the first woman to receive the award.

The award recognizes Richards-Kortum's substantial, long-lasting impact on engineering, her "fundamental contributions to education and scientific literacy in biomedical engineering and health care, and the development of creative educational programs, such as Beyond Traditional Borders, that encourage student critical thinking."

Richards-Kortum will be honored at the IEEE Board of Directors Meeting in New Brunswick, N.J., during a special awards ceremony Nov. 14.

	REBECCA RICHARDS-KORTUM

“The Beyond Traditional Borders program is one of the finest examples of original and timely initiatives for preuniversity and university students and is in line with IEEE’s desire to increase the understanding of engineering and its social impacts in general,” said Evangelia Micheli-Tzanakou, IEEE Vice President of Educational Activities, chair of the IEEE Educational Activities Board and professor of biomedical engineering at Rutgers University.

IEEE Vice President's Recognition Awards are not presented on a regular basis, and just six have been announced by IEEE’s Educational Activities Board since 2001.

Richards-Kortum is the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering, director of Rice 360°: Technology Solutions for World Health and founder of the Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB) initiative. In 2002, she was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) professor for her accomplishments in boosting scientific literacy and awareness of global health issues through the service course for nonengineering majors called "Bioengineering and World Health," which has become the cornerstone of the BTB initiative.

Since its inception, the vision to train students of all levels to reach beyond geographic and disciplinary borders to understand, address and solve global health challenges has grown to include a widespread network of educational, research and clinical collaborations and participation from diverse local and international community stakeholders.

IEEE particularly notes Rice’s BTB curricula, which includes a new minor in Global Health Technologies, a Global Health Technology Design Project program, a Summer International Internship program for students to take their technologies and educational programs for testing and implementation in the least developed countries, and a program aimed at the dissemination of widespread education initiatives for nonscience majors, middle school and high school students in the U.S. and abroad.

"Dr. Richards-Kortum is one of the most gifted engineering researchers and educators in the country,” said Sallie Keller-McNulty, dean of Rice's George R. Brown School of Engineering. “Her vision to combine technology with multidisciplinary education is creating a new workforce of globally minded leaders who have the capability, compassion and business skill sets needed in the 21st century.”

Richards-Kortum's other notable awards include the Presidential Young Investigator (1991) and Presidential Faculty Fellow (1992) awards from the National Science Foundation, the Becton Dickinson Career Achievement Award from the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (1992) and the Sharon Keillor Award for Women in Engineering Education (2004) and Chester F. Carlson Award (2007) from the American Society for Engineering Education. She also served on the inaugural National Advisory Council for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering for the National Institutes of Health (2002-2007) and was elected to the National Academy of Engineers in 2008.

--Shawn Hutchins is a staff writer in bioengineering.