Kathleen M. Giacomini, Ph.D., Professor and Chair of the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, received her Ph.D. in Pharmaceutics from the State University of New York at Buffalo and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University. Dr. Giacomini is considered a leader in the field of pharmacogenomics of membrane transporters. She led the discovery of coding region variants of about 50 membrane transporters that play a role in drug response in ethnically diverse populations. Dr. Giacomini has co-authored over 200 manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals and has received many awards for her research including the Dawson Award of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, the Rawls Palmer Award of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, the Therapeutic Frontiers Lecture Award from the American College of Clinical Pharmacy and the Scheele Award from the Swedish Academy of Pharmaceutical Scientists, the DeWitt Stetten Lecturer honor from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences 50th Anniversary and will receive the Distinguished Investigator Award for 2014 from the American College of Clinical Pharmacology. She was inducted into the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in 2007.