62 Who is Kathryn A. Whitehead?

Dr. Kathryn A. Whitehead is a professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She began her career earning a bachelors in Chemical Engineering at University of Delaware then earned her PhD in Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She then went on to an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellowship at MIT (2008 – 2012).

As a graduate student, Whitehead developed systems for the oral delivery of macromolecules. During her postdoc, she joined the Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT developing “biomaterials and methodologies for the advancement of RNA interference therapeutics” (1). Currently she runs the Whitehead Lab at Carnegie Mellon focusing on connections between delivery barrier biology and drug transport.

The polymer structure is a lipid nanostructure surrounding a mRNA. The outside lipid structures protect the mRNA and allow it to travel around the body and infiltrate cells so that the body can create an immune response to the mRNA which will allow the patient to be immunized against the mRNA. These new tailorable vaccines are being developed to combat the rapid emergence of novel virus variants.