Kathryn R. Nightingale. Kathryn Radabaugh Nightingale is an American biomedical engineer and academic in the field of medical ultrasound. She is the Theo Pilkington Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University, and an elected fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

Education 
As a freshman at Duke University, Nightingale was a member of the 1985–86 Duke Blue Devils women's basketball team and made the Atlantic Coast Conference Honor Roll for that year. While at Duke, she met her future husband, Roger Nightingale. She received the Bachelor of Science degree in 1989.

After spending three years in Texas stationed with the U.S. Army, Nightingale returned to Duke for her doctoral studies, conducting research under the supervision of Gregg Trahey. During this time, she studied the use of acoustic radiation force for imaging breast cysts and lesions. Nightingale received the Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1997, and her thesis was titled Ultrasonic Generation and Detection of Acoustic Streaming to Differentiate Between Fluid-Filled and Solid Lesions in the Breast.

Career 
Nightingale joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University as an assistant research professor in 1998, and then as an assistant professor in 2004. In 2011, she was named the James L. and Elizabeth M. Vincent Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and was subsequently promoted to full professorship in biomedical engineering in 2016. Since 2019, she has been the Theo Pilkington Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering. In 2023, she became the director of graduate studies for the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Duke.

She was elected a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) in 2015 "for pioneering the development of Acoustic Radiation Force Impulse elasticity imaging, which is now employed world-wide to stage hepatic fibrosis". In 2019, she was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). She was appointed a four-year term on the National Advisory Council for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, part of the National Institutes of Health, in 2020. In 2021, she received the IEEE Carl Hellmuth Hertz Ultrasonics Award from the IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control Society "for pioneering contributions to the field of radiation force imaging and measurements", and in 2022, she received the Joseph H. Holmes Basic Science Pioneer Award from the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine.

Nightingale's research interests include elastography, acoustic radiation force, and nonlinear acoustics.

Selected publications

References

External links 
 Duke University faculty profile
 Nightingale Lab website
 

20th-century American engineers
20th-century American women engineers
21st-century American engineers
21st-century American women engineers
American biomedical engineers
American women academics
Duke Blue Devils women's basketball players
Duke University faculty
Duke University Pratt School of Engineering alumni
Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering
Fellows of the National Academy of Inventors
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)