BME Distinguished Seminar Series - Rita Strack

Rita Strack obtained her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Chicago. While there, she worked with Benjamin Glick and Robert Keenan to engineer improved variants of the red fluorescent protein DsRed, and also studied the chemical mechanism of chromophore formation in DsRed. She continued her research as a postdoctoral fellow in Samie Jaffrey's laboratory at Weill Cornell Medical College, where she developed fluorescent reporters for live-cell imaging of RNA such as Spinach2. She has a broad range of interests including imaging, spatial biology, chemical biology, and machine learning. Rita was a senior editor at Nature Methods starting in November 2014 and she was appointed as Chief Editor at Nature Biomedical Engineering in August, 2025. She can be contacted at rita.strack@us.nature.com. This seminar will introduce Nature Biomedical Engineering and our editorial criteria, discuss the life of a manuscript from submission to publication, offer insights into how editors work, and provide tips on publishing high quality technology papers.