Giacomo Vacca's Biography

Giacomo Vacca, President & CEO, Kinetic River Corp

Giacomo Vacca, Ph.D., has physics degrees from Harvard (BA/MA) and Stanford (PhD). With Nobel Prize winner Bob Laughlin, he developed a novel ultrafast light scattering technique for his dissertation. He has been issued 77 patents to date. At Abbott Labs, Dr. Vacca invented and developed Laser Rastering, a radically innovative concept in flow cytometry that increased the rate of cell analysis by a factor of 30. In 2010 Dr. Vacca founded Kinetic River, a flow cytometry product development company. Since 2017, Kinetic River has been awarded five competitive Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grants from the NIH, totaling about $5M to date. Kinetic River's customers include NIH–NCI, Stanford, UC Davis, Italy's National Research Council, and enterprises from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Dr. Vacca is a past Abbott Research Fellow and a senior member of both SPIE and Optica, and is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of BioPhotonics magazine.