TMC PULSE

t m c » p u l s e | o c t o b e r 2 0 1 8 15 T wo years ago on Halloween, Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Ph.D., a professor of bioengi- neering at Rice University, walked into her lab and stopped abruptly. Staring back at her was a crowd of familiar characters. Her students, who wear cos- tumes for the holiday every year, had conspired to go as different versions of their mentor. There was the mother-of-six Rebecca, the sav- ing-dying-babies-in-Africa Rebecca, the marathon-runner Rebecca, even the Albert-Einstein Rebecca—a nod to the $625,000 fellowship Richards-Kortum received from the MacArthur Foundation. Commonly known as a "genius grant," the stipend is paid out over five years to support visionaries in their creative pursuits for the benefit of humanity. An honor of a lifetime, the MacArthur sits atop a long list of accolades Richards-Kortum has collected over more than three decades as a physicist, bioengineer and global health pioneer. She has developed 40 patents, authored numerous research papers and book chapters, and has been awarded grants from organizations that range from the National Institutes of Health to the U.S. Department of Defense and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2017, she was included on Fortune magazine's list of 50 World's Greatest Leaders— alongside the likes of Pope Francis, Angela Merkel and Shakira—for her efforts to end preventable newborn deaths in Africa. And in June of this year, she was selected to serve as a Science Envoy for the U.S. Department of State—one of only 23 scientists ever to receive the honor. "She seems to have boundless energy," said her husband, Philip Kortum, Ph.D. "She's up at 5:30, out sitting on the couch or in front of the fireplace working, and seems to be able to sustain that for just endless periods of time. She'll essentially sprint all day long, squeeze in a 12-mile run, and then work until it's finished. And she won't just do that for a couple of days to get a project done, but she'll do that again and again and again and again." Part of Richards-Kortum's genius lies in channeling her energy. A strategic thinker with a competitive spirit, she identifies a goal and then marches toward it, assembling an army of collaborators and building a plan of action so direct and so fundamentally sound that everyone around her wonders why no one thought of it sooner. But nothing about her work is easy, and bringing her plans to frui- tion is another story entirely. 'Just Becky Richards' As a young girl in Nebraska, Richards-Kortum dreamed of becoming a novelist. She cher- ished books like A Wrinkle in Time, Harriet the Spy and The Little Prince. But in high school, she found herself drawn to math and science. When it came time to pick a major at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln, Richards-Kortum chose physics because, as she put it, it was the hardest thing she could do. "I was so fortunate that the person who taught the freshman physics class I took, Paul Burrow, was this amazing teacher," Richards- Kortum said earlier this year in her office at Rice University's BioScience Research Collaborative. Now in her early fifties, she keeps her hair just past her shoulders and wears a round black running watch that she doesn't check as often as you'd expect. "He's one of the best teachers I ever took a class from—ever," she added. "He made it so engaging and fun." Not long after, when the chair- man of the physics department, David Sellmyer, encouraged her to work in his lab, Richards- Kortum discovered her love for applied science. "He was a hugely important mentor, and he totally changed the Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Ph.D., in her office at Rice University's BioScience Research Collaborative. direction of my career," she said. "What I took away from that is the power that one person can have on the direction of other people's lives. I try not to forget that as a mentor and as a teacher." She met Philip Kortum freshman year. They lived in the same build- ing, she in room 2211 and he in 2311, right upstairs. "We didn't actually meet in the dorm, though," said Kortum, now an associate professor of engineering psychology and human factors at Rice University. "Someone else on my floor had taken her to a party and then had consumed enough alcohol that he was unable to take her home, so I offered, and we just really hit it off. It was just one of those things—I kind of knew from the minute I met her that she was awesome." The couple got married the day after they graduated. "We took finals on Friday, grad- uated on Saturday, then got married on Sunday," Kortum recalled. "We just had a one-day honeymoon right there, because then we had to pack up the U-Haul and head out to Boston so she could go to MIT. I should have looked at that and said, 'This is going to be indicative of the pace that life is going to take with Rebecca.'" Of course, neither of them knew what the future had in store. "Back then, she was just Becky Richards," Kortum said. "She was just a physicist and I was just an engineer. I think that's one of the reasons we've got such a fabulous marriage. When we went out to Boston, we didn't have two dimes to rub together. We owned a lawn chair and a mattress." Equipment graveyards After wrapping up MIT with her M.S. in physics and a Ph.D. in medical physics, Richards-Kortum took a job at The University of Texas at Austin as a professor of biomedical engineering. (continued)

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