Rebekah Drezek

Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin (2001)
Associate Professor, Department of Bioengineering
Rice University

Research (Drezek Biophotonics Laboratory)
Dr. Drezek is an associate professor of bioengineering and electrical & computer engineering at Rice University. Her laboratory conducts basic, applied, and translational research at the intersection of medicine, engineering, and nanotechnology for the development of minimally invasive photonics-based imaging approaches that detect, diagnose, and monitor disease. Ontological applications are of particular interest to Dr. Drezek. Ongoing research in her laboratory is supported by the Whitaker Foundation, Welch Foundation, Coulter Foundation, Beckman Foundation, NSF, NIH, DOD CDRMP, and the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology. Dr. Drezek received the HSEMB Outstanding Young Scientist Award (2003), the MIT TR100 World’s Top 100 Young Innovators Award (2004), the AAMl Career Achievement Award (2005), and the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program (BCRP) Era of Hope Scholar Award (2007).

Education and experience
Dr. Drezek completed her undergraduate work in electrical engineering at Duke University and graduated summa cum laude in 1996. Her masters and doctorate degrees in Electrical Engineering were awarded in 1998 and 2001 at the University of Texas at Austin where she held a Whitaker Foundation Biomedical Engineering Graduate Fellowship. In 2001, she was the first engineer to receive the Odyssey Fellowship at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. Drezek has been a faculty member at Rice since 2002.