Prof. Almutairi is both the 2009 NIH Director’s New Innovator and winner of the PhRMA Foundation award for her research in nanotechnology for medical sciences.  She moved to California in 1997 to attend Occidental College where she was awarded the Rodna Nye Scholarship.  After receiving an Advanced Bachelor in Chemistry, Prof. Almutairi was selected to receive a GAANN fellowship to continue her studies at the University of California. 

In 2005, she completed her PhD in Materials Chemistry and received both the UC Dissertation Award and the prestigious UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship.  She continued her postdoctoral studies at the University of California Berkeley in the laboratories of Prof. Jean Fréchet, in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, after which she moved to the University of California San Diego in 2008 to establish the Laboratory for Bioresponsive Materials as a faculty of Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, NanoEngineering and the Materials Science and Engineering Program.

In a short period of time, she has established a high profile and productive research program that focuses on developing advanced technologies to detect, treat and prevent disease.

The Society of Nuclear Medicine and the Society of Molecular Imaging have ranked her latest findings as the top study of 2009.