Karen Cheung
Karen C. Cheung received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley, USA, in 1998 and 2002, respectively. From 2002 to 2005, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland. She joined the University of British Columbia in 2006.
Samantha Grist
Samantha is a postdoctoral fellow, developing silicon photonic biosensors.
She completed her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Professors Karen C. Cheung and Lukas Chrostowski. Her dissertation centered on creating a microfluidic platform that exposed tumour cells in 3D culture to controlled spatial and time-varying oxygen profiles. The platform reproduced the very low and cycling oxygen levels that can exist in tumours and which are linked with metastasis and resistance to treatment.
In 2020 she completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley under the guidance of Professor Amy E. Herr. At UC Berkeley she led a small research team working to develop new engineering tools to measure cell state via protein expression quantification.
Eric Cheng
Eric Cheng is a PhD student, developing a high throughput single cell dispensing system using inkjet technology. In 2015, he completed his MASc thesis in the area of inkjet printing of cell solutions. He completed his BASc in Electrical Engineering, Biomedical Option, in 2012 at UBC.
Tanya Bennet
Tanya Bennet is a PhD student developing a lung-on-chip platform with applications for identifying biomarkers for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and therpeutic targets. She completed her BASc in Integrated Engineering at UBC in 2016, with focus on Biomedical Engineering, Bioprocessing and Biomaterials.
S. Soroush Nasseri
S. Soroush Nasseri is a PhD student developing microscale tumour models, and studying nanoparticle penetration through tumour spheroids. He completed his M.A.Sc. in Chemical and Biological Engineering (2009 to 2012) at the University of British Columbia, and his B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering (2005 to 2009) at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.
Vinny Randhawa
Vinny completed his Bachelors in Chemical Engineering at the University of Toronto. His Masters work in Biomedical Engineering is studying how a microfluidic airway-on-a-chip platform can be used to investigate effects of aerosols on lung epithelial cells.
Tiffany Cameron
Tiffany completed her Bachelors of Applied Science in Sustainable Design Engineering at the University of Prince Edward Island in 2019. Her Masters project in Biomedical Engineering, under the co-supervision of Drs Karen Cheung and Cheryl Wellington, is to develop a microfluidic model of the brain microvasculature with relevence to neural degenerative disease.
Jessica Hua
Jessica completed her Bachelor of Applied Science in Electrical Engineering at UBC. Her Masters work in Biomedical Engineering is studying the extracellular matrix remodeling within a microfluidic airway-on-a-chip system using multiphoton microscopy.
There are no Master of Engineering Students working at the lab right now.
There are no Master of Engineering Students working at the lab right now.
Alumni
Sherry Zuo
Sherry is a 2018 summer co-op student from the University of Toronto. She is currently completing an undergraduate degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a minor in Biomedical Engineering.
Justin Leung
Summer research student, 2017
Madeleine Iseminger
Madeleine was an undergraduate coop student investigating inkjet printing. She is studying Biophysics at UBC.
Dickson Yao
Dickson is an undergraduate coop student investigating inkjet printing. He is studying Engineering Physics at UBC.
Samantha Grist
Dr. Samantha Grist completed her PhD work in 2016, under the supervision of Prof. Lukas Chrostowski. She is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Berkeley.
Samantha is passionate about learning, solving problems, and working on interdisciplinary research. Her research focuses on using microfluidics to recreate the microenvironment of cells within tumours during in vitro experiments such as drug screening. Specifically, she uses 3-D cell culture and on-chip oxygen control to recreate chronic and time-varying low oxygen levels that can exist in tumours and influence cell behaviour and drug response. Samantha has also integrated optical oxygen sensors, measured using fluorescence microscopy, into these environments as well as worked on novel imaging protocols to improve data analysis from 3-D cell cultures. In addition to her thesis work, Samantha has designed and tested optical biosensors using silicon nanophotonics technology combined with microfluidics.
Jonas Flückiger
Jonas completed his PhD work, entitled “Enhancing the Performance of Silicon Photonic Biosensors”, in September 2016 under the co-supervision of Prof. Lukas Chrostowski. He is a Product Marketing Manager at Lumerical Solutions, Inc.
Yichuan Wang
Yichuan Wang was an undergraduate coop student in the BioMEMS group in 2016, focusing on the Hydrodynamic Response of the cells in Piezoelectric Inkjet Nozzles.
Yichuan is an enthusiastic undergraduate student from UBC Mechanical Engineering department. He joined UBC in 2015 as a Cape Breton University International Entrance Scholarship holder. He is also interested in Photography and Plastic Modelling.
Anthony Hsu
Anthony was a 2016 Fall Co-op Research Assistant, working on achieving more consistent cell distribution when printing cell solutions with piezoelectric dispense capillaries. Anthony is a UBC mechanical engineering student in the mechatronics specialization. He is interested in robotics and automation, but also excited about the biomedical field and new medical technologies.
Jannu Casanova Moreno
Dr. Jannu Casanova-Moreno was a postdoctoral fellow developing microfluidic systems and electrochemical sensors. He completed his PhD in Chemistry at UBC in 2014. He is now an Assistant Professor at Cideteq in Mexico.
http://www.cideteq.mx/dr-jannu-ricardo-casanova-moreno/
Yan Li
Dr. Yan Li’s research focuses on the microsystems with the integration of multiple components (i.e., electrical, electrochemical, fluid) for biomedical applications. In 2015, Yan joined in the university of British Columbia as a postdoctoral research fellow and is currently focusing on piezoelectric inkjet systems for cell printing, microfluidic graphene systems for biosensing as well as graphene neural interfaces. Yan received his B.S. degree from Xidian University (Xi’an, China) and M.Eng. degree from Peking University (Beijing, China); and the Ph.D. degree from IMEC & KU Leuven-University of Leuven (Leuven, Belgium) in 2015, where he developed a microfluidic system for energy harvesting and biosensing. Before UBC, he also worked in the retinal prosthesis project in Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Science (Shenzhen, China).
Loic Laplatine
Dr. Loic Laplatine’s research is focused on industrial technology transfer of biosensing techniques for medicine and environmental monitoring. His research interests include silicon photonics, optical microscopy, microfluidics and instrumentation. His current work is geared toward the proof-of-concept of an inexpensive disposable cartridge biochips that can be analyzed by a portable readout device to simultaneously measure the concentration of multiple analytes within tiny samples of physiological fluids or water. This project funded by a 2-year MITACS Accelerate grant is a collaboration between the Bio-Medical Micro Devices laboratory and the Photonics Research laboratory at UBC, and Luxmux, an industrial partner in Calgary. He also works on BioMEMS which reproduce the physiological hypoxic conditions (i.e. oxygen level) found in real tumors on 3D cell spheroids grown in vitro. He is mainly focusing on experiments based on two-photon and confocal microscopy to quantitatively analyze the spheroids response over time.
In 2014, he defended a Ph. D. in instrumental development for Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) microscopy at CEA Grenoble, France. His research led to a ten-fold improvement in image quality compared with previous commercial or research-based devices. This project was led in collaboration with Horiba Jobin Yvon and Prestodiag and targeted applications in the health and food safety industries. In 2010, he defended a MSc in physics engineering at INSA Toulouse, France. His main project was the development of a new immobilization method to image yeasts and Aspergillus spores by Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) at LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France. He also worked on a novel label-free biosensing technique based on the diffraction of Moleculary Imprinted Polymer (MIP) in collaboration with Innopsys.
Ali Ahmadi
Dr. Ali Ahmadi completed his BSc in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Tehran in 2004. In 2007, he completed his MSc degree from the same university after having researched fluid properties in spray and droplet breakup. In May 2011, he completed his PhD degree in the School of Engineering at the University of British Columbia with the research focus on the Digital Microfluidic systems. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Sustainable Design Engineering at the University of Prince Edward Island.
http://www.upei.ca/engineering/faculty/ali-ahmadi
Adam Noel
Adam Noel completed his PhD in 2015 under the co-supervision of Prof. Robert Schober, working in molecular communication. He is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom.
Enxiao Luan
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Enxiao Luan completed his PhD under the co-supervision of Drs Karen Cheung and Lukas Chrostowski, in the area of silicon photonic biosensors using label-free detection.
Previous Degrees and Universities: M.Eng. In Biomedical Engineering at Harbin Institute of Technology, China; B.Sc. In Biotechnology at Harbin Institute of Technology, China
Anika Meng
Summer Research Student, 2016
Bruce Jingwu Hou
Summer Exchange Research Student, 2016
Alexander Ding
Alexander Y. Ding was a visiting student (2015, 2016) from the University of Toronto. His research interests include digital systems, computer architecture, and bioinformatics. He previously worked on an image analysis program and is currently developing software for extracting spheroid information. Alexander will be interning at Microsemi (San Jose, CA) in 2016-2017. In his free time, Alexander enjoys playing the piano, travelling, and listening to K-pop music.
alexander.ding@mail.utoronto.ca
Josiah To
Josiah completed his MASc thesis, entitled “Developing a novel heterogeneous three electrode system for a PDMS-based microfluidic electrochemical sensor”, in 2015. He is now a medical student at Chicago Medical School.
Jonathan Schmok
Summer research student, 2015.
Jonathan is now a PhD student in Bioengineering at the University of California San Diego.
Linfen Yu
Dr. Linfen Yu received her PhD in 2008 at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at UBC from 2009 to 2014, developing microscale tumour models and microfluidic platforms for drug screening. She is now at Shenzhen Bio-Rain Technology Co., Ltd, a start-up company developing ddPCR systems, reagents, and microfluidic platforms.
Cynthia Ni
Summer research student, 2014.
Cynthia is now a PhD student in Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Daljeet Chahal
Daljeet completed his MASc in Biomedical Engineering in 2012. His thesis was entitled “Enhanced piezoelectric drop-on-demand cell dispensing through neutral buoyancy”. He is now a Resident Physician with Vancouver Coastal Health
News
MicroTAS 2018
Soroush Nasseri will give a poster presentation of our work at the MicroTAS 2018 conference in Taiwan. Hope to see you there! https://cbmsociety.org/conferences/microtas2018/
MicroTAS 2017
Soroush Nasseri will give poster presentations of our work at the MicroTAS 2017 conference in Savannah. Hope to see you there! http://microtas2017.org/
SLAS 2017
Samantha Grist will be presenting as a Top 5 Finalist for the SLAS2017 poster competition on February 6 in Washington DC. Hope to see you there! http://www.slas2017.org
Soroush and Samantha: Tony B. Academic Travel Award winners
Soroush and Samantha were both selected for Tony B. Academic Travel Awards to attend the SLAS 2017 conference!
Are You an Alumnus of our Lab?
Please get in touch with Karen