Rebecca Richards-Kortum is the Malcom Gillis University Professor, Professor of Bioengineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering, director of Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health Technologies, and founder of the Beyond Traditional Borders initiative at Rice University. She joined Rice in 2005, and has served two terms as Chair of the Bioengineering Department (2005-2008; 2012-present). Guided by the belief that all of the world’s people deserve access to health innovation, Richards-Kortum’s research and teaching focus on developing low-cost, high-performance technology for low-resource settings. She is known for providing vulnerable populations in the developing world access to life-saving health technology, focused on diseases and conditions that cause high morbidity and mortality, such as cervical and oral cancer, premature birth, and malaria. Richards-Kortum is also leading a multi-institutional team to develop a package of 17 life-saving neonatal technologies, designed for low-resource settings while providing the same efficacy as related technologies used in North America, but at a fraction of the cost. Current technologies are being tested and applied through multidisciplinary collaborations with clinicians and researchers at Rice, the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Baylor College of Medicine, UT Health Science Center-Houston, the British Columbia Cancer Agency. Over the past few years, Richards-Kortum and collaborators have translated these technologies from North America to both low- and medium-resource developing countries (Malawi, China, Botswana, El Salvador, and Brazil). Richards-Kortum’s research has led to the development of 40 patents and more than 310 refereed research papers. Her teaching programs, research and collaborations have been supported by generous grants from the National Institutes of Health (National Cancer Institute), National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Defense, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Lemelson Foundation, US Agency for International Development, Whitaker Foundation, and Virginia and LE Simmons Family Foundation. Richards-Kortum is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was one of the twenty-three 2016 Fellows named by the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation. She also received the highest honor bestoed by The American Institute for Medical and Biomedical Engineering in 2016, the Pierre Galletti Award. She was named a Professor of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2002 and 2006. With Maria Oden, she received the Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation in 2014. She received her BS in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Nebraska, and her MS in Physics and PhD in Medical Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology