SELECTBIO - Lab-on-a-Chip and Microfluidics Europe 2021 Keynote Speakers

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Nancy Allbritton

Frank and Julie Jungers Dean of the College of Engineering and Professor of Bioengineering, University of Washington in Seattle

Nancy L. Allbritton is the Frank and Julie Jungers Dean of the College of Engineering and Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Her research focuses on the development of novel technologies for applications in single-cell analysis, micro-arrays and fluidics, and organ-on-chip and has resulted in over 180 full-length journal publications and patents and led to 15 commercial products. Her research program has been well funded by the National Institutes of Health with $60 million in grant funding since 1994. Four companies have been formed based on her research discoveries: Protein Simple (acquired by Bio-Techne in 2014 for $308M), Intellego (subsequently integrated into International Rectifier), Cell Microsystems (www.cellmicrosystems.com), and Altis Biosystems (www.altisbiosystems.com). Dr. Allbritton is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute for Medical & Biological Engineering, and the National Academy of Inventors. She obtained her B.S. in physics from Louisiana State University, M.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and Ph.D. in Medical Physics/Medical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University.

Andrew J deMello

Professor of Biochemical Engineering & Institute Chair, ETH Zürich

Andrew is currently Professor of Biochemical Engineering in the Department of Chemistry & Applied Biosciences at ETH Zürich, and until October 2020 was Head of the Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering. Prior to his arrival in Zurich, he was Professor of Chemical Nanosciences and Head of the Nanostructured Materials and Devices Section in the Chemistry Department at Imperial College London. His research interests cover a broad range of activities in the broad areas of microfluidics and nanoscale science. Primary specializations include the development of microfluidic devices for high-throughput biological and chemical analysis, ultra-sensitive optical spectroscopies, microfluidic tools for material synthesis and clinical diagnostic technologies.

Dino Di Carlo

Armond and Elena Hairapetian Chair in Engineering and Medicine, Professor and Vice Chair of Bioengineering, University of California-Los Angeles

Dino Di Carlo received his B.S. in Bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002 and received a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco in 2006. From 2006-2008 he conducted postdoctoral studies in the Center for Engineering in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has been on the faculty in the Department of Bioengineering at UCLA since 2008 and now as Professor of Bioengineering and Mechanical Engineering serves as the Vice Chair of the Department and as the director of the Cancer Nanotechnology Program in the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. His research pioneered the use of inertial fluid dynamic effects for the control, separation, and analysis of cells in microfluidic devices. His recent work extends into numerous other fields of biomedicine and biotechnology including directed evolution, cell analysis for rapid diagnostics, new amplified molecular assays, next generation biomaterials, and phenotypic drug screening. He has also been a leader in technology entrepreneurship: He co-founded and currently serves on the board of directors of five companies that are commercializing UCLA intellectual property developed in his lab (CytoVale, Vortex Biosciences, Tempo Therapeutics, Forcyte Biotechnologies and Ferrologix). Among other honors he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2016, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) in 2014, was awarded the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development award and the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award, the Packard Fellowship and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award, and received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award and Coulter Translational Research Award.

Lorena Diéguez

Leader of the Medical Devices Research Group, INL- International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory

Lorena Diéguez joined INL in 2014 as a Staff Researcher and is, since 2018, the leader of the Medical Devices research group. Her research is mainly devoted to Translational Medical Research in close collaboration with hospitals and focuses on the development of tools and solutions based on microfluidics, biosensors and nanotechnology towards early diagnosis and better understanding of diseases. She is also very interested in translating her technology from the lab to the clinic and is co-founder and CEO of the spin-off company RUBYnanomed in the field of liquid biopsy. Currently, she is also the Chair of the Working Group in Medical Devices at the ETPN (European Technology Platform in Nanomedicine). She obtained her Bachelors in Physics with a Major in Optoelectronics at the University of Santiago de Compostela in 2005, then completed her Masters in Nanotechnology at the University of Barcelona (UB) in 2007 and her PhD in Biosensors at the UB, the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia and the ETH Zürich. Her postdoc at the University of South Australia (2010-2013) was devoted to the study of rare cells from biological samples using microfluidics.

Noah Malmstadt

Professor, Mork Family Dept. of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science, University of Southern California

Noah Malmstadt is Professor at the University of Southern California. He received a BS in Chemical Engineering from Caltech and a PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Washington. Following postdoctoral work at UCLA, he joined the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at USC in 2007. Malmstadt is the recipient of a 2012 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator award. His research focuses on microfluidic strategies to facilitate material fabrication and biophysical analysis. He has pioneered the integration of ionic liquids as solvents in droplet microreactors and the application of microfluidic systems to synthesizing biomimetic cell membranes. Microfluidic analytical techniques he has developed include methods for measuring the permeability of cell membranes to druglike molecules and techniques for measuring ionic currents through membrane proteins.

Nicole Pamme

Professor in Analytical Chemistry, Stockholm University

Prof. Nicole Pamme holds a chair in Analytical Chemistry at Stockholm University in the Department of Materials and Environmental Chemistry and she is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Hull (UK) in the Department of Chemistry. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). Her research activities focus on Lab-on-a-Chip devices for pharmaceutical, clinical and environmental analysis, biomedical research with tissue-on-a-chip devices as well as process integration and material synthesis in collaboration with Chemistry, Engineering and Biomedical Sciences. She has authored >150 peer reviewed publications, patents and book chapters in this area. Prof. Pamme has served on the programme committee of the microTAS conference and chaired the microTAS 2016 conference in Dublin. She served on the Board of Directors of the Chemical and Biological Microsystems Society (CBMS) including as President (2019-21). Nicole is an Associate Editor for the Analyst (RSC Publishing) and serves on the editorial advisory boards of Lab on a Chip (RSC Publishing), Analytical Chemistry (ACS Publications) and Analytica Chimica Acta (Elsevier). Her teaching activities include lectures on microanalytical and forensic chemistry, biosensors and separation science; Nicole has also co-authored a textbook for UG students on Bioanalytical Chemistry, now in its second edition.

Nicole Pamme obtained a Diploma in Chemistry from the University of Marburg (Germany) in 1999. For her PhD studies she went to Imperial College London (UK) where she joined the group of Prof. Andreas Manz. It was here that she first started working with microfluidic devices, more specifically, on single particle analysis inside microfluidic channels. In 2004, she moved to Tsukuba (Japan) as an independent research fellow in the International Centre for Young Scientists (ICYS) based at the Japanese National Institute for Materials Science. She was appointed as a lecturer in Hull in December 2005 and moved up to Professor by 2014. In 2021, she moved to Stockholm.

Steve Soper

Foundation Distinguished Professor, Director, Center of BioModular Multi-Scale System for Precision Medicine, The University of Kansas

Prof. Soper is currently a Foundation Distinguished Professor in Chemistry and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. Prof. Soper also holds an appointment at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in Ulsan, South Korea, where he is a World Class University Professor. He is also serving as a Science Advisor for a number of major worldwide companies. Prof. Soper is currently on the Editorial Board for Scientific Reports and Journal of Micro- and Nanosystems.

As a result of his efforts, Prof. Soper has secured extramural funding totaling >$103M and has published over 265 peer-reviewed manuscripts (h index = 71) and is the author of 20 patents. He is also the founder of a startup company, BioFluidica, which is marketing devices for the isolation and enumeration of circulating tumor cells. His list of awards includes Chemical Instrumentation by the American Chemical Society, the Benedetti-Pichler Award for Microchemistry, Fellow of the AAAS, Fellow of Applied Spectroscopy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, R&D 100 Award, Distinguished Masters Award at LSU and Outstanding Scientist/Engineer in the state of Louisiana in 2001. Finally, Prof. Soper has granted 60 PhDs and 6 MS degrees to students under his mentorship. He currently heads a group of 20 researchers.

Valérie Taly

CNRS Research Director, Professor and Group leader Translational Research and Microfluidics, Université Paris Cité

V. Taly is a CNRS research director and group leader of the Translational Research And Microfluidics team within the clinical oncology research unit MEPPOT (personalized medicine pharmacogenomics and therapeutic optimization) in the Cordeliers Research Center (university Paris Cité). Her team performs interdisciplinary researches aiming at developing and validating microfluidic tools for cancer research in close collaboration with clinicians and researchers in oncology and toxicology. Since 2008, she developed droplet-based digital procedures for Cancer diagnosis. Recently, her research has been dedicated to the clinical validation of droplet-based microfluidics for the non-invasive detection of Cancer biomarkers, the highlighting of new Cancer Biomarkers and the development of original tools and procedures for their detection with applications in personalized medicine, cancer recurrence detection and cancer diagnostics. She is co-founder of EMULSEO (2018) and METHYS DX (2021) start up companies.

Paul Yager

Professor, Department of Bioengineering, University of Washington

Paul Yager is the Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Washington, Seattle. Professor Yager served as the The Hunter and Dorothy Simpson Endowed Chair, Department of Bioengineering from 2008-2013. Professor Yager's research focuses on microfluidics and its applications in global health.