Deirdre R. Meldrum PhD, is currently the Arizona State University (ASU) senior scientist, director of the Biosignatures Initiative to transform healthcare, director of the Centre for Biosignatures Discovery Automation (CBDA) in the Biodesign Institute, and tenured full professor of Electrical Engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. She was director and principal investigator of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Centre of Excellence in Genomic Sciences (CEGS): Microscale Life Sciences Centre (MLSC), 2001-2013 with $36M in support, pioneering live single-cell analysis technologies to study cellular heterogeneity in cancer and other diseases. She has led research programmes totaling nearly $80M over 20 years, spanning the topics of automation for genomics, microscale systems for biological applications, biosignatures, robotics, sensors, sensorbots for biogeochemical sensing in the oceans, flexible structures, and fuzzy logic control for freeway transportation systems. As part of her ocean exploration research, Dr. Meldrum dove on the Alvin submersible off the research vessel (R/V) Atlantis in the NE Pacific Ocean to 2200 meters below sea level in 2006, to perform Raman spectroscopy and other experiments. She has been engaged in research and education forums with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Institutes of Health. Internationally, she served on the Swiss NSF panel for the SystemsX Systems Biology Programme, met with NSF of Taiwan regarding collaborations with University of Washington, and met with the leaders of Singapore to forge partnerships with ASU.
In her recent role as dean of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU, 2007-2010, Dr. Meldrum transformed engineering into an organisation fully aligned with the emerging U.S. grand challenges as outlined by the National Academy of Engineering. As dean, she hired 74 new faculty (19 women), increased annual research expenditures from $55M to $74M, oversaw the award of the first successful NSF Engineering Research Center at ASU, launched a major project in Vietnam with support from Intel and USAID to train engineering faculty, mentored junior faculty to win 15 NSF CAREER awards, created the Engineering Staff Success Programme (ESSP), raised $94M in donations, launched the Engineering Career Centre, launched Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS), and chaired 4 national/international conferences.
At the University of Washington, 1992-2006, Dr. Meldrum was professor and founder/director of the Genomation Laboratory in the Department of Electrical Engineering. From 1985-1987, she was a member of the technical staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory working on the Galileo spacecraft, large flexible space structures, and robotics. As an engineering co-op student at the NASA Johnson Space Centre in 1980 and 1981, she was an instructor for the astronauts on the shuttle mission simulator. In 1979, she designed structures on Navy ships and submarines at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. Dr. Meldrum is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Association for Women in Science (AWIS), the Human Genome Organization (HUGO), the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), and Sigma Xi. Her honors include an NIH Special Emphasis Research Career Award (SERCA) in 1993, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 1996 “for recognition of innovative research utilizing a broad set of interdisciplinary approaches to advance DNA sequencing technology”, Fellow of the AAAS in 2003, Fellow of IEEE in 2004, Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE)'s College of Fellows in 2015, senior editor for the IEEE transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE) 2003-2010, Chair of the IEEE T-ASE Advisory Board 2010-2011, member of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2006-2008 and 2011-2014, and member of the advisory board for Microsoft Research Connections, 2007-2013.
Deirdre R. Meldrum received the BS in civil engineering from the University of Washington (Seattle, WA) in 1983, the MS in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY) in 1985, and the PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University (Stanford, CA) in 1993. She completed the Stanford Executive Programme at Stanford University in 2009.
For more information, please visit Dr. Deirdre Meldrum´s profile at the ASU website.
