ADAH ALMUTAIRI - 2023

Professor Adah Almutairi is a scholar, inventor, and entrepreneur. Her work focuses on nanomedicine, nanotechnology, chemistry, and polymer science. She is the Chairman and Founder of eLux Medical and a Professor of Nanoengineering and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego. Professor Almutairi is best known for discovering the first nanoparticle that responds to inflammation in the body. This life-changing innovation led her to win the NIH New Innovator Award in 2009, which aims to encourage highly innovative research.

She has also won PhRMA Foundation Award, and the Young Investigator Award, and was a Kavli Fellow for the US National Academy of Sciences in 2016.

Professor Almutairi completed her Ph.D. in Materials Chemistry at UC Riverside and came to UC San Diego in 2008 from UC Berkeley, where she worked with Professor Jean Fréchet to develop several nanoprobes for in vivo imaging. Professor Almutairi has 13 issued patents and much more pending, several of which have been licensed and one of which is being developed by eLux Medical.

Professor Almutairi is also the co-director of the Center for Excellence in Nano-Medicine and Engineering (CNME), where researchers create nanoparticles that aim at new levels of precision in treating disease, like delivering drugs under highly specific conditions — when triggered by light or when they encounter a disease-related situation.

Her groundbreaking work was highlighted by U.S. NIH director Francis Collins to Congress as one of the 4 most important American technology breakthroughs of the year 2012. She was featured in Forbes as one of the top 10 “Most Influential Women in Engineering in the World.” Her lab’s research has been recognized by Chemical & Engineering News and Materials Today, among other scientific media outlets. She has also written a number of scientific articles on the NanoLipo technology.