Annelise E. Barron, Ph.D.

Vision Statement for SBE
I was pleased to be ask to run for a position on the Managing Board of the Society for Biological Engineering (SBE), an important professional society under the umbrella of AIChE.  I would be excited to help guide the SBE through a critical time, now that it is almost 4 years old and will be expanding its activities.  The past 12-15 years have seen a tremendous and exciting paradigm shift within chemical engineering, in academia and to a considerable extent in industry as well.  At this point, 8 of the top 25 chemical engineering departments have renamed themselves to reflect a more biological thrust to their research programs (Chemical & Biological Engineering, and Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering are popular choices).  Sixteen of these departments now have faculty members who are doing research related to (for example), biomimicry, broadly defined.  Chemical engineers are increasingly collaborating with organic chemists to design and make new molecules that will enable new biotechnologies or pharmaceuticals; and are working with clinicians to test them in animals and humans.  The youngest generation of chemical engineers are cross-training themselves to do all of this work within their own laboratories. Some of the leaders within the important fields of bioinformatics and complex systems analysis are chemical engineers, but we need to work harder to raise the profile of chemical engineering in these fields.  Biological engineering is much broader, however, and it is a challenging question how chemical engineers can leap into that ocean without becoming infinitely dilute and losing their moorings to their home discipline.  Personally, I am fiercely proud of being a chemical engineer; I am the only one, presently, in Stanford’s new Department of Bioengineering, and to join this department was a hard choice for me.  I support the SBE’s driving mission, to promote the integration of biology with engineering and realize its benefits through developments in biomedical and biomolecular applications and bioprocessing.  I will help to plan effective use of SBE resources to connect engineers and scientists, cultivate knowledge, and catalyze and invigorate the future of the discipline.  I also will help plan a way to raise the awareness of chemical engineering’s growing contribution to the biotechnology and medicine among biologists and chemists.  We are presently 1900 members, and it would be excellent to see this membership grow and raise SBE’s visibility while also increasing the vibrancy of our interactions among ourselves and in concert with other professional societies.  I believe that I have an appropriate background and personality to help make this happen.  I am a member, for example, of the American Chemical Society, American Physical Society, Materials Research Society, and Biophysical Society.

Biographical Information
Annelise Barron is a tenured Associate Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in Chemical Engineering. She was born in 1968 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and raised there until age 5, then in Fairbanks, Alaska until age 10, and Seattle, Washington to age 21.  Her father is a native South American from Oruro, Bolivia, while her mother is American, from Whitewater, Wisconsin.  She received her B.S. degree in chemical engineering in 1990 from the University of Washington, Seattle, and her Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1995 from the University of California, Berkeley, where she worked with Prof. Harvey W. Blanch. She was an NIH-NRSA Postdoctoral Research Fellow in pharmaceutical chemistry, working jointly in Prof. Ken A. Dill’s laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco and in bioorganic chemistry at Chiron Corp. in Emeryville, CA with Dr. Ronald N. Zuckermann.  In January 1997, she began a tenure-track assistant professorship in chemical engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.  In just under 10 years as a faculty member at Northwestern, she rose to the rank of full professor with tenure.  In September 2007, she moved to Stanford University’s Department of Bioengineering.  Her group’s research at Stanford is focused on the development of novel protein and peptide mimics based on biostable “foldamers,” as well as synthetic water-soluble polymers for high-efficiency DNA separations on microfluidic devices. She presently supervises a research group of 29 young scientists, and has published more than 77 peer-reviewed articles.  She has just completed 3 years of service as a member of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the NIH, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, and is a permanent member of the NIH’s Synthetic and Biological Chemistry B Study Section.  She has previously served on the NIH Instrumentation and Systems Development Study Section.  She is a Deputy Editor of the international journal Electrophoresis.  Dr. Barron’s honors include the DuPont Young Professor Award, Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and Beckman Young Investigator Award.  She has been a member of AIChE since 1991.