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. 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.

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

Recognition

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. She was named to the 2026 class of IEEE Fellows, "for development, commercialization, and clinical translation of non-invasive ultrasound elasticity imaging technology".

Selected publications