Nicolas Szita's Biography

Nicolas Szita, Professor, University College London

Nicolas Szita has significant expertise in microbioreactors and microfluidics, which encompasses performing cell cultivation in a microfluidic format, biochemical micro reactor design and microfluidic device fabrication, and the system-wide integration of microfluidic and analytical devices. For his doctoral degree at ETH Zurich, he created a microfluidic pipetting device from silicon and glass, with integrated capacitive sensors for the liquid handling of microlitre volumes with nanolitre precision. At MIT, he established multiplexed microfluidic bioreactors, and demonstrated highly reproducible parallel batch fermentations. This led to the first demonstration that multiplexed microbioreactors can be designed to provide in situ and real-time kinetic process data that are comparable with bench-scale reactor data. The microbioreactors were linked to gene expression analysis, analysed for glucose consumption, organic acid production, and for oxygenation capacity. During his time at the Technical University of Denmark, he initiated doctoral projects on continuous culture microbioreactors for single use and which have led to international collaborations. At UCL, he has developed a microbioreactor for enzyme reactions integrated with inline filtration for the production of chiral metabolites. He has also developed a microfabricated cell culture device which permits the long-term culture of human and mouse embryonic cells. Current work includes the development and integration with monitoring concepts for cell confluency and dissolved oxygen to start quantifying stem cell culture processes.