Jessica Winter

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Jessica O. Winter (born 1976) is an American bioengineer and a professor of chemical, biomolecular, and biomedical engineering at Ohio State University, where she also serves as associate director of the MRSEC Center for Emergent Materials. Her work focuses on nanoparticles for cancer imaging, diagnostics, drug delivery, and how cells move in the brain tumor environment.

Winter grew up in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, the daughter of a physicist father and a chemist mother. She earned a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering from Northwestern University in 1997, then completed her Master of Science (2001) and PhD (2004) in chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Her PhD thesis was titled “Development and Optimization of Quantum Dot-Neuron Interfaces.”

After college, she worked as a process engineer before returning to academia at Ohio State University. There she began developing nanoparticle materials to detect cancer. In 2012, she co-invented fluorescent nanoparticles called Quantum Dots that change color when tagging molecules in biomedical tests, helping to identify diseases and track their progress. She then extended this work to detect cancer cells in breast tissue and co-founded Core Quantum Technologies to commercialize the Quantum Dots developed in her lab. Winter also completed an NSF entrepreneurship program and underwent reconstructive surgery to address breast cancer.

Her achievements have earned multiple honors. She was named Inventor of the Year by TechColumbus in 2012. In 2014, she was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for her work with magnetic quantum dots in cell and molecular separations. She became a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2016 for contributions to biomolecular engineering, particularly magnetic quantum dots for imaging and separations. In 2021, she was recognized with fellowships from the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Biomedical Engineering Society, and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. Winter has also led the QSTORM project with Peter Kner at the University of Georgia to develop new ways to visualize the inner workings of cells.