Kathryn Whitehead

Change Agent, Consultant, Educator/Teacher, Engineer, Idea generator, Inventor, Scientist, Technologist

Kathryn A. (“Katie”) Whitehead, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor and Dean’s Career Fellow in the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Her lab builds tiny packages that deliver medicine to the right places in the body. For example, she studies the lipid particles that deliver the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines from BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna. The Whitehead Lab also formulates protein therapeutics like insulin for oral administration and investigates how the maternal cells in breastmilk can be used to deliver medicines to infants. Katie received a B.S. Degree with Distinction from the University of Delaware (2002) and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara (2007) before an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellowship at MIT (2008 – 2012). Prof. Whitehead is the recipient of numerous awards, including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, the DARPA Director’s Fellowship, and the ASEE Curtis W. McGraw Research Award. She has also received the Controlled Release Society’s Young Investigator Award and currently serves on the society’s Board of Directors. Prof. Whitehead is an elected fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and was named as a Pioneer on the MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 list and as one of the Brilliant Ten by Popular Science. Her publications have been cited over 7,000 times, and several of her patents have been licensed and sublicensed for reagent and therapeutic use.

Science, engineering, and mental health! As a society, we have lost unquantifiable talent & progress bc 1) of stigma and 2) capitalism is diametrically opposed to the holistic support of the people who drive our economy. As someone who has experienced mental illness, I’ve made it my mission to de-stigmatize the discussion of mental health in personal & professional settings and to advocate for the institutional change needed to keep people healthy and happy.

The fatty particles that package the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines will revolutionize medicine as we know it.

breast milk, oral protein delivery, RNA therapeutics, science communication

singing, dancing, and making eclairs