Rebekah Rasooly, Ph.D.
Rebekah Rasooly, Ph.D., was appointed director of the Division of Extramural Activities in April 2022. Prior to joining NICHD, she served as acting director of the Division of Extramural Science Programs at the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) and chief of the NINR Wellness, Technology, and Training Branch. In this role, she was responsible for scientific leadership and overseeing grants policy and management in support of NINR’s research and training mission.
Dr. Rasooly has worked in the NIH extramural program since 1999 to stimulate, plan, direct, and evaluate biomedical research programs. She brings a wealth of experience and best practices from her time working in several other NIH institutes. Her NIH career began at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, where she served as a program director and deputy chief of the Genetics and Molecular Neurobiology Branch. From 2001 to 2017, Dr. Rasooly was the director of the Genetics & Genomics Program in the Division of Kidney, Urologic, and Hematologic Diseases at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and served as deputy director of the division for three years. In addition, she served as a part-time program policy officer in the NIH Office of Extramural Research for several years.
Dr. Rasooly did her undergraduate work at Harvard University and received her Ph.D. in genetics from Michigan State University. After completing postdoctoral work at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, she was a Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences at St. John’s University, where she led a funded research program on chromosome segregation in Drosophila melanogaster.
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