Lydia Sohn's Biography

Lydia Sohn, Almy C. Maynard and Agnes Offield Maynard Chair in Mechanical Engineering, University of California-Berkeley

Lydia L. Sohn received her A.B. (Chemistry and Physics, 1988), M.S. (Physics, 1990), and Ph.D. (Physics, 1992) from Harvard University. She was an NSF/NATO postdoc at Delft University of Technology and a postdoc at AT&T Bell Laboratories (1993-1995). Sohn was an Assistant Professor of Physics at Princeton University prior to joining the Mechanical Engineering Dept. at UC Berkeley in 20013. Her work focuses on developing quantitative techniques to probe single cells. Sohn has received numerous awards including the NSF CAREER, Army of Research Young Investigator Award, DuPont Young Professor Award, and a Bakar Fellowship. In 2014, she was one of five winners in the “Identifying Platform Technologies for Advancing Life Sciences Research” competition for her work on Node-Pore Sensing. Most recently, she was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

mechano- and visco-NPS: An Electronic Method to Measure the Mechanical Properties of Cells

Thursday, 28 March 2019 at 10:00

Add to Calendar ▼2019-03-28 10:00:002019-03-28 11:00:00Europe/Londonmechano- and visco-NPS: An Electronic Method to Measure the Mechanical Properties of CellsCirculating Biomarkers World Congress 2019 in Coronado Island, CaliforniaCoronado Island, CaliforniaSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com

We have developed an efficient, label-free method of screening cells for their phenotypic profile, which we call Node-Pore Sensing (NPS). NPS involves measuring the modulated current pulse caused by a cell transiting a microfluidic channel that has been segmented by a series of inserted nodes. Previously, we showed that when segments between the nodes are functionalized with different antibodies corresponding to distinct cell-surface antigens, immunophenotyping can be achieved. In this talk, I will show how we have significantly advanced NPS by simply inserting between two nodes a “contraction” channel through which cells can squeeze. “Mechano-NPS”, as we now call our method, can simultaneously measure a cell’s size, resistance to deformation, transverse deformation, and ability to recover from deformation. As I will show, mechano-NPS can distinguish malignant from non-malignant epithelial cells and discriminate between sub-lineages and, excitingly, chronological age groups of primary human mammary epithelial cells. Moreover, mechano-NPS can track malignant progression. By replacing the contraction channel with one that is sinusoidal in shape, we can measure the viscoelastic properties (elasticity and viscosity) of cells. I will show how “visco-NPS” can quantify the mechanical transitions of cells as they traverse the cell cycle or are initiated into an epithelial-mesenchymal transition.

Add to Calendar ▼2019-03-27 00:00:002019-03-29 00:00:00Europe/LondonCirculating Biomarkers World Congress 2019Circulating Biomarkers World Congress 2019 in Coronado Island, CaliforniaCoronado Island, CaliforniaSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com

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