Michael Heller's Biography

Michael Heller, Professor, Dept Bioengineering, University of California-San Diego

Michael J. Heller received his PhD in Biochemistry from Colorado State University in 1973. He was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University from 1973 to 1976. From 1976 to 1984 he was supervisor of the DNA Technology Group at Amoco Corporation (Standard Oil Indiana) During that time he carried out early bioengineering and recombinant DNA work on plants, algae and photosynthetic bacteria for energy and chemical production, and developed some of the first fluorescent resonant energy transfer (FRET) and chemiluminescent oligonucleotide probes for DNA hybridization analysis. He also oversaw Amoco’s sponsored energy and chemical research work at Cetus Corporation, which included the cloning of thermophilic enzymes. Dr. Heller was the Director of Molecular Biology at Molecular Biosystems, Inc., from 1984 to 1987. He was a co-founder of Integrated DNA Technologies, and served as President and Chief Operating Officer from 1987 to 1989. He was a co-found of Nanogen and served as the Chief Technical Officer from 1993 to 2001. Nanogen carried out the successful development and commercialization of electronic DNA microarray technology for clinical diagnostic genotyping applications. Dr. Heller is a Professor (Recall/Emeritus) in the Departments of Nanoengineering and Bioengineering at the University California San Diego. He is also now a Distinguished Scientist at the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), Center for Cancer Early Detection and Research (CEDAR), in Portland, Oregon. He has also co-founded a company called Biological Dynamics which is developing new sample to answer cancer diagnostics technology, based on the novel dielectrophoretic (DEP) technology developed at his UCSD lab. Dr. Heller has extensive industrial experience in biotechnology, biomedical and molecular diagnostic devices and nanotechnology, with particular expertise in the areas of DNA probe diagnostics, electrokinetic lab-on-a-chip devices, DNA synthesis, FRET/fluorescent-based detection technologies and electric field assisted self-assembly of DNA nanostructures. Dr. Heller has over 100 publications and 56 issued US patents.