UT honors Drezek for leadership in bioengineering research and education

Rice Bioengineer Rebekah Drezek has received the 2008 Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni Award from the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas for her contributions to bioengineering research and education. The prestigious award recognizes the professional contributions of alumni under 40 years of age. 

Drezek, associate professor of bioengineering and in electrical and computer engineering, conducts basic, applied, and translational research at the intersection of medicine, engineering, and nanotechnology towards the development of minimally invasive photonics-based imaging approaches for detection, diagnosis, and monitoring of disease.

A Rice faculty member since 2002, Drezek specializes in oncological applications. Medical imaging plays a critical role in all aspects of breast cancer care from initial screening and diagnosis to guiding and monitoring therapeutic interventions. Ongoing projects in her group include the development of novel optical spectroscopy and imaging instrumentation for tissue diagnosis; validating developed optical instrumentation; advancement of molecular specific optical contrast agents; experimental studies to elucidate the biophysical origins of measured optical signals; and computational modeling of the interaction of light with biological tissue.

Notable awards Drezek has received include the HSEMB Outstanding Young Scientist Award (2003), MIT TR100’s Top 100 Young Innovators Award (2004), Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) Career Achievement Award (2005), and The Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program (BCRP) Era of Hope Scholar Award (2007). Furthermore, she was one of 100 U.S. scientists invited to attend the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Frontiers of Engineering event in 2005 and is one of 16 scientists invited to speak at the meeting in 2006.

In the area of education, Drezek received the Rice University Graduate Student Teaching Award (2004), Rice Faculty Impact Award (2005), Brown Foundation Undergraduate Teaching Innovation Grants (2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007), and a Faculty Initiatives Fund award to establish the new Rice Teaching Grant Program (2007), a parallel graduate arm of the Brown Foundation Undergraduate Teaching Grant competition.

Drezek graduated summa cum laude with a BSE degree in Electrical Engineering from Duke University in 1996 and received a doctorate in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2001.