Wednesday, October 17
8:30 AM - 9:30 AM

Keynote Speech: Chemistry-free microfluidic technologies to sort cells for health and disease

SPEAKER BIO

Dr. Utkan Demirci, UofM’99, Stanford’01’05, is a Professor of Radiology (with tenure) and of Electrical Engineering (by courtesy) at the Canary Center at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection, Stanford University School of Medicine, where he leads a productive group of ~20 researchers. Dr. Demirci’s lab is focused on creating micro- and nano-scale technologies that manipulate cells to enable solutions for real world problems in medicine. His group has pioneering contributions in multiple fields including infectious diseases, fertility, cancer diagnostics, cell encapsulation, cryobiology, and biofabrication. His research interests involve the application of microfluidics, nanoscale technologies and acoustics in medicine as it pertains to portable, inexpensive, disposable viral load technology platforms for HIV in resource-constrained settings for global health problems, as well as 3-D bioprinting and tissue models, including 3-D cancer and neural cultures. He has earned many awards including IEEE EMBS Early Career, NSF Career, MIT TR-35, and fellow-elect AIMBE. He holds over 20 patents, provisional, and disclosures and his patents have been translated into products through multiple start-up companies including DxNOW, Koek Biotechnology and LEVITAS. Some of the technologies developed in his lab are now clinically available across the globe, with over 10,000 live births in the US, Europe and Turkey being attributed to the sperm selection technology that came out of Dr. Demirci's lab.