Dr. Natacha DePaola serves as Director of Illinois Tech Digital Medical Engineering and Technology Research and Education Center (IDMET) and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago, USA (https://www.iit.edu/idmet). Dr. DePaola is a former GEDC Chair and current GEDC Ambassador. Dr. DePaola was previously Carol and Ed Kaplan Armour Dean of Engineering at IIT (2009-2020) and Chair of the Global Engineering Deans Council (GEDC) from 2017-2019. Dr. DePaola received a Ph.D. in Medical Engineering/Medical Physics at Harvard Medical School – Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991 and between 1994-2009 she joined the biomedical engineering faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where she served as assistant, associate, and full professor, and department head. 

Dr. DePaola is committed to excellence in engineering education and the empowerment of a diverse and agile workforce to succeed in today’s rapidly changing technological-driven industry and society. Her research investigates the role of physical mechanisms on cellular behavior stressing its importance in the understanding of human disease, the development of new therapies, and the engineering of functional tissues and devices. Dr. DePaola is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and in 2012 she received the IEEE Woman in Engineering Award. In 2024 Dr. DePaola was recipient of OAS Science and Technology Award for outstanding contribution to the advancement of the scientific and technological development of the Americas.