Jon Dobson, a joint professor in the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Materials Science & Engineering, has been inducted as a Fellow into the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). This honor is reserved for the top 2% of bioengineers who have excelled in their field. AIMBE’s mission is to provide leadership and advocacy in medical and biological engineering for the benefit of society. The ceremony inducting new fellows will take place in Washington D.C. on March 16, 2015, during AIMBE’s annual event.
Dr. Dobson received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the University of Florida and his Ph.D. in Natural Sciences from The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH-Zurich). From 2000 until 2011, he worked at Keele University in the United Kingdom, becoming a full professor of biophysics and biomedical engineering in 2003. He returned to UF as faculty in 2011, and a year later was appointed as the founding director of its cross-departmental Institute for Cell Engineering and Regenerative Medicine (ICERM). His research interests are focused primarily on biomedical applications of magnetic micro- and nanoparticles and the development of instrumentation for those applications. He also develops synchrotron x-ray, magnetometry and MRI-based techniques to exploit naturally occurring magnetic iron oxides in the brain for diagnostic and mechanistic studies of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Dobson has founded two successful spin-off companies in the UK – nanoTherics and MICA BioSystems – and has 14 patents awarded or pending. In addition to the AIMBE, Dobson is a Fellow of the Society of Biology, the Royal Society of Medicine and the Institute of Nanotechnology.