September 18, 2009

Allbritton named BME department head

Dr. Allbritton
(Photos: submitted)

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Dr. Nancy Allbritton has been named the new head of the joint UNC-NC State Department of Biomedical Engineering, effective September 1, 2009. She is the first woman department head in the history of the College of Engineering at NC State.

She replaces Dr. Troy Nagle, who had led the department since its founding in 2003.

Allbritton, the Paul Debreczeny Distinguished Professor at UNC Chapel Hill, has received widespread acclaim for her research on cell signaling networks and microfabricated systems for cellular analysis. She comes to the joint department from Department of Chemistry at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she has been a distinguished professor since 2007. She also held a joint appointment with the UNC School of Medicine in the Department of Pharmacology.

Allbritton’s research program at UNC has received more than $28 million in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health over the past 15 years. She is the scientific founder of two companies, Cell Biosciences and Intellego, and holds five patents with more than 20 pending.

Upon completion of a postdoctoral fellowship in cell biology at Stanford University in 1994, Allbritton joined the faculty of the University of California at Irvine where she held joint appointments in the Departments of Physiology and Biophysics, Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, and Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. She has received numerous awards including a Beckman Young Investigator Award and a Searle Scholar Award.

Allbritton received her Ph.D. in medical physics/medical engineering from MIT and her M.D. from Johns Hopkins University.

-degraff-

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