Professor Jane Hill

Dartmouth engineering professor Jane Hill has been inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows, one of the highest professional distinctions accorded to a medical and biological engineer.

The AIMBE College of Fellows is comprised of just two percent of medical and biological engineers in the country who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering and medicine research, practice, or education” and to "the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of medical and biological engineering, or developing and implementing innovative approaches to bioengineering education."

“It is a wonderful honor to be elected by my peers to the AIMBE,” says Professor Hill. “The award is also a testament to the hard work my entire team has put into our research passion—faster detection of infections”

Hill was nominated, reviewed, and elected by peers and members of the College of Fellows for “outstanding contributions to the development, validation, and implementation of metabolomics in the early detection of lung infections.”

Hill’s use of breathprints—exhaled breath—to reveal what’s happening inside a person’s lungs could revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of acute and chronic respiratory diseases, such as tuberculosis and chronic infections that affect people with cystic fibrosis. “The end goal is a point-of-care device that can collect the breath sample from the patient and rapidly generate a diagnosis,” says Hill.

Professor Hill discusses her work to advance breath-based diagnosis of infectious diseases:

Hill joins other AIMBE Fellows from Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth, including Brian Pogue, the MacLean Professor of Engineering; Keith Paulsen Th'84 Th'86, the Robert Pritzker Professor of Biomedical Engineering; John Zhang, Professor of Engineering; Robert Dean Jr., Adjunct Professor of Engineering, Emeritus; and Richard Greenwald, Adjunct Professor of Engineering and co-founder and president of Simbex.

Hill was inducted along with 156 colleagues who make up the AIMBE College of Fellows Class of 2019 at the AIMBE Annual Meeting at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC on March 25.

While most Fellows hail from the US, AIMBE has inducted Fellows representing 30 countries. AIMBE Fellows are employed in academia, industry, clinical practice and government and are among the most distinguished medical and biological engineers including 2 Nobel Prize laureates, 17 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Science and/or Technology and Innovation, and 158 inductees to the National Academy of Engineering, 72 to the National Academy of Medicine and 31 to the National Academy of Sciences.