Sunitha Nagrath, Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

Dr. Sunitha Nagrath is a Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at University of Michigan. Dr. Nagrath received her Ph.D. in 2004 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY in Mechanical Engineering. She did her postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical/Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, under the mentorship of Dr. Toner. Dr. Nagrath is the leading scientist who designed the MEMS based technology, “CTC-Chip” for the sensitive isolation of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from the blood of cancer patients. She joined the University of Michigan in 2010 as a tenure track faculty, where she established her laboratory focused on engineering innovative microfluidic devices and nanomaterials for implementing personalized precision medicine via liquid biopsy. Dr. Nagrath’s major focus of research is on understanding cell trafficking in cancer through the isolation, characterization, and study of circulating cells and extracellular vesicles in the peripheral blood of cancer patients. She is a co-director of the Liquid Biopsy Shared Resource at UMICH Comprehensive Cancer Center, where she oversees the services of isolation and characterization of biomarkers and their implementation in clinical studies. She is an elected fellow of AIMBE and received several accolades including, Analytical Chemistry Young Innovator Award, and NIH Director’s New innovator award. Dr. Nagrath is the co-founder and the board member of Labyrinth Biotech, a biotechnology company commercializing some of the technologies that are developed in her lab.