Subra Suresh, director of the U.S. National Science Foundation, will give the 2011 IBB Distinguished lecture on, "Investigation of Human Diseases at the Intersections of Engineering, Natural Sciences and Medicine." 

Suresh was sworn in as NSF director on October 18, 2010, and is the Vannevar Bush Professor of Engineering (on leave) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds joint faculty appointments in Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Biological Engineering and Health Sciences and Technology.

Suresh’s work as a researcher, educator, and academic administrator across a wide range of disciplines—including mechanical engineering, materials science, and biomedical engineering— have been recognized by academic and professional organizations around the world. His experimental and computational modeling work on the mechanical properties of structural and functional materials, his innovations in materials design and characterization and his discoveries regarding the connections between cellular nanomechanics and human diseases such as malaria have shaped new fields at the intersections of traditional disciplines.

Here is an abstract for his lecture: Major advances in various branches of engineering and natural sciences, together with transformational developments in information technology, computational modeling and simulation, genetics, genomics and nanotechnology, have provided unprecedented opportunities to explore human health and diseases at the cellular and molecular levels. Such developments have also facilitated new opportunities to study fundamental mechanistic processes with the goal of developing basic scientific understanding, new diagnostic tools, and novel therapeutics for a range of human diseases and disorders. This presentation will provides an overview of some recent accomplishments and opportunities for future exploration. Specific examples are drawn from the study of infectious diseases, hereditary blood disorders and cancer.