Dr. Frances Ligler will be joining the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University as a professor this spring.
“I am looking forward to working with talented faculty and students in biomedical engineering and to building collaborations across the university,” Ligler said.
Ligler has published research in the fields of biosensors, microfluidics, tissue-on-chip systems and regenerative medicine. She has also performed research in biochemistry, immunology and analytical chemistry. She has 37 issued U.S. patents and 11 commercially produced biosensor products.
Before joining Texas A&M, Ligler served as the Ross Lampe Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering in the College of Engineering at North Carolina State University, and School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Furman University and a D.Phil. and a D.Sc. from Oxford University, and spent 33 years working in industrial and government research laboratories.
She is an elected member, past chair of the Bioengineering Section and former councillor of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. She is also Fellow in the International Society for Optics and Photonics, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the American Association of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors.
She is a 2017 inductee of the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame, honored for her invention of portable optical biosensors. In 2020, she received the Simon Ramo Founders Award from the National Academy of Engineering.
Ligler's husband, Dr. George Ligler, will also be joining the College of Engineering in spring 2022 as a professor.