On Jan. 1, Princess Imoukhuede joined UW as the Hunter and Dorothy Simpson Endowed Chair and Professor in Bioengineering.
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she earned a Ph.D. in bioengineering at Caltech, the first African American woman to do so. As a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, she earned the prestigious United Negro College Fund/Merck Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. She is the recipient of many other awards, such as the Biomedical Engineering Society 2021 Mid-Career Award and the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program Award.in 2020, she was named one of the 1,000 “inspiring Black scientists” by Cell Mentor.
Imoukhuede joined UW from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was an associate professor of bioengineering and director of diversity initiatives.
UW Bioengineering (BioE) recently spoke with Imoukhuede about her background, lessons from diversity efforts and opportunities ahead for the department.
What inspired your interest in bioengineering, and what makes it meaningful for you?
I was lucky as a child to be part of different enrichment programs, which exposed me to principles in biology, engineering, math and science. It was through those programs that I first saw girls and other underrepresented students who shared my interests in the STEM disciplines. During my junior year of high school, I was matched to do research at the Midwestern University College of Pharmacy. I worked with chemical engineers to learn the process of drug microencapsulation, which allows drugs to release over time. That’s where my interest in bioengineering started to form, using chemistry and biology principles to solve problems in medicine.
