Barbara Baird, a leading researcher in the allergic immune response system at the molecular level, has been named director of Cornell University's Nanobiotechnology Center (NBTC). She succeeds Harold Craighead, who has been named interim dean of the Cornell College of Engineering. The appointment is effective July 1.

Baird, who has been a full professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell since 1991, says she hopes to bring to the NBTC a combination of steady progress in those systems that are well understood with bold experimentation in riskier areas. "We have the latitude to do risky things while moving ahead more slowly on the solid parts. I think that's critical in providing the best possible contribution to biology," she said.

NBTC was established at Cornell in January 2000 with a five-year, $19 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The center, the only one of its kind in the nation, brings together biologists, engineers, materials scientists, physicists and chemists to work at the "nano" scale (as small as a few billionths of a meter) to invent hybrid devices combining the organic with the inorganic to advance research in molecular and cell biology. As the home of NBTC, Cornell leads a research consortium that includes Princeton University, Clark Atlanta University, the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health, Howard University and Oregon Health Sciences University.

Baird's laboratory, which she co-directs with her husband, David Holowka, a physical biochemist, has for more than two decades been studying the general mechanism of allergic immune response. In particular, the couple's research has focused on the cell surface receptor for immunoglobulin E, called the IgE receptor, which plays a central role in the allergic immune response. "If you are an allergic individual, you become allergic because you are exposed to certain molecules in the environment, such as pollen or cat dander. The immune response operates by causing the generation of a class of antibodies, IgE," said Baird. These antibodies have receptors that bind both to the cell -- thus sensitizing the cell -- and to the invading allergen. The next time a molecule of pollen or dander invades, the cell is ready to respond.

Baird and Holowka's research into how the antibody stimulates the cell to respond, thus setting off a whole variety of biochemical pathways in the cell, has produced a broad range of research into what triggers an allergic reaction. The researchers have found that the binding action of IgE causes the synthesis of leukotrines and prostaglandins, molecules released by the cell and the cause of inflammatory responses. They have also found that storage granules in the cell fuse with the plasma membrane and release their contents, one of which is histamine. This causes rhinitis (runny nose), itchy eyes and other symptoms of allergy.

Baird's interest in nanobiotechnology was stimulated by the promise of finding new tools to bring to bear on biological problems. "If we could develop tools at the same length scale as molecules, we could measure and manipulate them. That drew me in," she said. For example, she said, an antibody has the function of "recognition." If that same molecule could be placed inside a device, the device itself could perform the same functions of binding or linking to other molecules.

Baird was born in Decatur, Ill., and received her B.A. degree in 1973 at Knox College. She earned both her M.S. (1975) and her Ph.D. (1979) in chemistry at Cornell. She was named an assistant professor at Cornell in 1980, following a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and an associate professor in 1986. She received the Harold Lamport Award for Biophysics and Physiology from the New York Academy of Sciences in 1988, a faculty award for women in science and engineering from the National Science Foundation in 1991 and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1993.

She is co-director, with Frederick Maxfield, professor of biochemistry at Weill Cornell Medical College, of the W.M. Keck Program in Cellular and Molecular Biophysics of Signal Transduction. She also is program director of molecular biophysics for an NIH-funded training program at Cornell for graduate students in biophysics.