(4f) Platform Technologies for Biomarker Signature Discovery and Personalized Diagnostics

Research Interests: My research interests lie at the interface of materials engineering, bioanalytical chemistry, and biology, with a focus on developing new biosensing technologies for diagnostic and predictive applications. The biological complexity and heterogeneity of many diseases such as cancer present critical challenges for early diagnosis and accurate prediction of therapy responses. To address these challenges, my research program will integrate ultrasensitive analytical techniques with materials engineering to develop platform technologies for accelerating the discovery of biomarker signatures. My lab will pursue three main directions: (1) design of biomimetic and polymeric materials for capturing biomolecular signatures in biological fluids; (2) high-resolution “chemical nose” sensor arrays, leveraging the functional versatility of polymeric materials; and (3) ultrasensitive single molecule detection of protein biomarkers in tumor-derived extracellular vesicles for cancer diagnostics. This highly interdisciplinary program will build upon my graduate and postdoctoral experiences in biomaterials, polymer chemistry, and analytical chemistry, as well as foster many opportunities for collaborations with clinicians, computer scientists, and proteomics experts.

Teaching Interests: As a chemical engineer by training, I am excited to teach both core undergraduate chemical engineering courses and specialized topic graduate level courses in various chemical and biomedical engineering fields. Specifically, I am interested in teaching or creating new courses in biosensing, drug delivery, or polymer synthesis.

Research Experience: During my Ph.D. in Dr. Paula Hammond’s lab at MIT, I developed a highly potent small interfering RNA (siRNA) nanoparticle delivery system using complementary approaches in biomolecular engineering and polymer chemistry. This highly interdisciplinary work spanned the preclinical therapeutic development pipeline from nucleic acid and polymer design to validation of the developed nanoparticle system in mouse models of cancer, thus enabling me to acquire a diverse skillset. In my postdoctoral training in Dr. David Walt’s lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, I have acquired complementary expertise in bioanalytical chemistry and pioneered ultrasensitive single molecule detection technologies that can detect attomolar protein concentrations – over 10,000-fold lower than the detection limits of conventional protein detection methods. I have further obtained funding to support this work through an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein F32 postdoctoral fellowship from NIBIB.

Complete List of Published Work in My Bibliography:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=2i3FhMoAAAAJ&hl=en