Regina Murphy
Regina Murphy, Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Wisconsin
Professor Regina Murphy received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 1978 from MIT. She then worked for five years at Chevron's Richmond Refinery in Richmond, California, where she wore several hats (all of them hard) as a design engineer, process engineer, operations assistant, and lead design engineer. She returned to MIT for graduate studies in 1983 and completed a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 1989 under the direction of Prof. Clark Colton and Dr. Martin Yarmush. Her Ph.D. research investigated the size and structure of antigen-antibody complexes, and adsorption of antigen-antibody complexes to immobilized Protein A. She joined the faculty in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1989. On campus, she is associated with the Biomedical Engineering Department and the Molecular Biophysics Program, and is on the steering committee for the NIH-sponsored Biotechnology Training Grant. Her research interests are in biophysical chemistry as applied to problems in biomedicine. She has current particular interest in establishing the role of amyloid protein aggregation in Alzheimer's disease pathology, and in developing more effective immunotoxins for targeting cancer cells. She is the recipient of a several awards including an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Jordi Folch-Pi Award from the American Society for Neurochemistry, and a Romnes Faculty Fellowship. She is the current holder of the Harvey D. Spangler Chair in Chemical Engineering.