Hadiyah-Nicole Green

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Hadiyah-Nicole Green (born 1981 in St Louis, Missouri) is a medical physicist credited with developing a method for using laser-activated nanoparticles to treat cancers.

After the deaths of her parents before she was four years old, Green was raised by an aunt and uncle in St Louis. With encouragement from elders in her community she added "Hadiyah" (Kiswahili for "gift from God") to her name during high school. She was elected class president three times, organized Black History Month events, and self-published a book of poems. After graduation she attended a summer program in computer science at Xavier University in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Green earned a full academic scholarship to Alabama A&M University. A graduate student there steered her toward physics and she completed her bachelor of science, specializing in fiber optics with Aisha Fields, with a minor in mathematics. During the summers she participated in internships at the University of Rochester's Institute of Optics in Rochester, New York; and at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

She was crowned Miss Alabama A&M with a platform of women's empowerment during her senior year. Shortly after graduating in 2003 she learned that her aunt, Ora Lee Smith, had been diagnosed with a female reproductive cancer. Smith declined treatment with chemotherapy and radiation, and Green stayed with her as a primary caregiver until her death in 2005. Soon later her uncle, General Lee Smith, was also diagnosed with esophageal and prostate cancer. He did receive chemotherapy and radiation treatment and suffered severe side effects before his death in 2013.

From those experiences, Green developed a specific interest in cancer research. She went on to earn a master's and Ph.D. in physics while on full scholarship at UAB in 2009 and 2012. While conducting her doctoral research, Green was a member of a team led by Sergey Mirov that developed a laboratory method to insert gold nanoparticles into cancer cells while avoiding surrounding healthy cells. Her contribution, and the subject of her dissertation, "A Minimally-Invasive Multifunctional Nano-Enabled Approach for Selective Targeting, Imaging, and NIR Photothermal Therapy of Tumors," was to use lasers to illuminate and heat the nanoparticles in order to better image and destroy cancer cells. She demonstrated the technique in petri dish samples and in mice.

After a short-time research position at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Green was invited to joint the faculty of Tuskegee University's Department of Material Science and Engineering as an assistant professor in 2013. In 2015, with her third application, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs awarded her a $1.1 million research grant through their Historically Black Colleges and Universities Research Scientist Training Program. She joined the Morehouse School of Medicine's Department of Surgery in 2016 and founded the non-profit Ora Lee Smith Cancer Research Foundation, named for her aunt, to support advancements in cancer research and treatment.

References

  • McCarter, Mark (October 2, 2014) "Throwback Thursday: Alabama A&M homecoming and a most non-traditional Miss Alabama A&M." Huntsville Times
  • Vollers, Anna Claire (January 5, 2016) "Alabama scientist, one of nation's few black female physicists, breaks ground in cancer research." Huntsville Times
  • León, Felice (January 9, 2016) "A Story of Perseverance: Hadiyah-Nicole Green Shares Her Path to a Million-Dollar Research Grant." The Root
  • Makowski, Emily (April 1, 2020) "Hadiyah-Nicole Green Targets Cancer With Lasers." The Scientist

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