Paul Yager's Biography

Paul Yager, Professor, Department of Bioengineering, University of Washington and CSO, UbiDX, Inc.

Paul Yager, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Washington and the CSO, UbiDX, Inc. A native of Manhattan, he received his A.B. in Biochemistry from Princeton in 1975, and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Oregon in 1980, specializing in vibrational spectroscopy of biomolecules. After an NRC Fellowship at the Naval Research Laboratory (1980-1982), he joined the NRL staff as a Research Chemist. He moved to the Center (now Department) of Bioengineering at the University of Washington as Associate Professor in 1987, advancing to Professor in 1995; he served as Chair of the department from 2007 to 2013. Initially working on both self-organizing lipid microstructure and optically-based biomedical sensors, since 1992 his lab has focused primarily on development of microfluidics for the analysis of biological fluids for use in low-cost point-of-care biomedical diagnostics for the developed and developing worlds. From 2005-2010 a team led by Yager was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a low-cost rugged point-of-care system for pathogen identification. Since 2008, most lab activity (with several close partners) has focused on developing two-dimensional porous networks for ultra-low-cost instrument-free point-of-care pathogen identification for human diagnosis. Readout is often coupled with cell phones for quantitative analysis and data transmission; this has been under support of NIH, NSF, DARPA and DTRA. He has authored 156 research publications in refereed journals, and has 40 issued patents. Specifics are at http://faculty.washington.edu/yagerp/.