| Description | Microfluidics for Medical Diagnostics and Global Health
Peter Lillehoj Ph. D.
Associate Professor, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering; Adjunct Professor, Institute of International Health at Michigan State University (MSU). ABSTRACT: In the past few decades, microfluidics has led to significance advances in basic biomedical research as well as clinical medicine through the development of miniature devices which are low cost, reliable and simple to use. Towards this end, my lab explores new strategies to create innovative microfluidic and BioMEMS platforms for broad applications in point-of-care testing and global health. In this talk, I will present a few of these technologies, including a mobile phone-based biosensor for rapid malaria diagnosis, a skin patch for blood-free malaria infection detection and textile biosensors for in vitro diagnostic testing and wearable health monitoring. The design and fabrication of these devices, as well as experimental results demonstrating their capacity to perform analytical measurements using clinical samples, will be presented. I will conclude by briefly commenting on our efforts to translate these technologies into clinical practice, as well as the future directions of this research and its potential to improve healthcare, both domestically and globally. SPEAKER BIO:: Peter B. Lillehoj is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering and an Adjunct Professor in the Institute of International Health at Michigan State University (MSU). He received a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2006 from Johns Hopkins University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2008 and 2011, respectively. Dr. Lillehoj is the director of the Integrated Microsystems Laboratory at MSU, which conducts interdisciplinary research to develop medical microtechnologies for point-of-care testing and global health. His research on smartphone-based biosensors and wearable biosensors has been featured in various news media, including The Huffington Post, The Gates Notes, CBS and Gizmodo. He has served as a guest editor for a special issue on New Developments in Global Health Technologies for the Journal of Laboratory Automation and is currently serving as an Editorial Board member for Scientific Reports. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award and two Grand Challenges Exploration grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. |
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