The Department of Bioengineering is pleased to announce that Dr. Julia Lyubovitsky has joined the faculty for the Fall of 2007 as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Lyubovitsky brings to the department her expertise in biomedical imaging and non-destructive optics techniques to address disease diagnostics, advance tissue engineering, expand nanotechnology and develop novel biomaterials. She is also developing a molecular level understanding of protein/peptide assembly and disassembly to study and, ultimately, control complex biological systems.

Dr. Julia Lyubovitsky received her undergraduate degree in Chemistry (cum laude) at the New York University where she worked with Professor Stacey Bent and investigated molecular mechanisms of chemical reactions on semiconductor surfaces using ATR FTIR spectroscopy and thermal programmed desorption in ultra high vacuum. Professor Lyubovitsky then entered a graduate program at California Institute of Technology in 1997. Working there on the interdisciplinary problem of protein folding under the direction of physical inorganic chemist Prof. Harry B. Gray and Director of Beckman Institute Laser Resource Center Dr. Jay R. Winkler, she established a novel application of pump/probe lifetime Foster Energy Transfer technique to study molecular mechanisms of protein folding. Her thesis included time-resolved measurements of fluorescence energy transfer from a protein bound donor to the heme acceptor of cytochrome c. This work had significant impact and was featured in a Science article “Proteins open to big challenges” and The Economist as a major advance in protein folding.

In 2003, Professor Lyubovitsky joined Beckman Laser Institute at University of California, Irvine as a Hewitt Medical Fellow. There she had an opportunity to extend her expertise in protein spectroscopy to biology and medicine, in particular imaging biological systems using multi-photon optical microscopy (MPM).