Q&A
Questions for Nancy Allbritton
Dr. Nancy Allbritton became the new head of the Joint UNC-NC State Department of Biomedical Engineering in August 2009. She talks about her background, her plans for the department and the fast-growing field of biomedical engineering.
What role does engineering play in health care, which has made so much national news recently? When I think of engineers, I think of people who improve the quality and function of our lives. That may be building bridges, but it also may be building a better artificial knee. A big part of life’s quality is your ability to carry out your daily activities and do things that excite you. Engineering helps us to do those things as long as possible.
What attracted you to this position? The potential to build a first-rate department is here. You have a great medical school at UNC and a great College of Engineering at NC State. You have dynamic faculty. And nearby you have Research Triangle Park, which is important because biomedical engineering is closely tied to industry, commercialization and biotechnology. It just doesn’t get any better than that.
Your background seems to suit the job well. Tell us about it. I interweaved work on a Ph.D. in medical engineering and medical physics at MIT with work on a medical degree at Johns Hopkins. After doing postdoc work at Stanford, I became a faculty member at UC-Irvine, where I helped found their department of biomedical engineering. I came to this position from the chemistry department at UNC, where I continue my biomedical microtechnologies research.
NC State has made improving health and well-being a key focus area. How does your department fit in with that initiative? It's a very forward-looking idea on NC State's part, and we see ourselves being a key player. The National Institutes of Health and other funding agencies like to see groups of researchers from different fields working together, and between the colleges of engineering and veterinary medicine, as well as other entities at NC State, there are huge opportunities for our researchers to partner with others here.
Where do you want to take the department? We've laid out three primary research directions: rehabilitation engineering, imaging engineering and biomedical microtechnologies. All three capitalize on the strengths of both NC State and UNC and reflect North Carolina's interest in bolstering its leadership role in cancer research, diagnostics and therapeutics.
Why is biomedical engineering such a fast-growing field? One
reason is the growing trend among the biological and medical sciences to become
more quantitative. We also recognize that technology is really what spurs
leaps in biomedical research, and biomedical engineering is one of the natural
suppliers of that technology. With federal funding agencies showing great
interest in these areas, it's a very good time to be an engineer or a physical
scientist in a biomedical field. 