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.

Node-Pore Sensing: A Label-Free Method to Immunophenotype and Mechanophenotype Single Cells

Friday, 5 May 2023 at 11:00

Add to Calendar ▼2023-05-05 11:00:002023-05-05 12:00:00Europe/LondonNode-Pore Sensing: A Label-Free Method to Immunophenotype and Mechanophenotype Single CellsInnovations in Microfluidics 2023 in SeattleSeattleSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com

We have developed an electronic method to screen cells for their phenotypic profile, which we call Node-Pore Sensing (NPS). NPS involves using a four-terminal measurement to measure 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 straight “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. When the contraction channel is sinusoidal in shape, resulting in cells being periodically squeezed, mechano-NPS can also measure the viscoelastic properties of cells. I will describe how we have used mechano-NPS to distinguish chronological age groups and breast-cancer risk groups of primary human mammary epithelial cells and identify drug-resistant acute promyelocytic leukemia cells—all based on mechanical properties. I will also describe the development of the next-generation NPS platform which utilizes advanced signal processing algorithms—Barker and Gold codes—directly encoded in the NPS channels to thus achieve multiplexing.

Add to Calendar ▼2023-05-04 00:00:002023-05-05 00:00:00Europe/LondonInnovations in Microfluidics 2023Innovations in Microfluidics 2023 in SeattleSeattleSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com

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