Lab on a Chip Blog

For the third post in the Introducing series, here we’re very happy to introduce you to Editorial Board member Holger Becker and his research vision, including the development of lab on a chip technology to marketable products:

Dr Holger Becker is co-founder and CSO of microfluidic ChipShop GmbH. He obtained physics degrees from the University of Western Australia/Perth and the University of Heidelberg in 1990 and 1991 respectively. He started to work on miniaturized systems for chemical analysis during his PhD thesis at the Institute for Applied Physics at Heidelberg University, where he obtained his PhD on miniaturized chemical surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensors in 1995. Between 1995 and 1997 he was a Research Associate at the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College in London with Prof. Andreas Manz. In 1998 he joined Jenoptik Mikrotechnik GmbH where he was responsible for the realisation of a polymer-based microfabrication production line. Since then, he founded and led several companies in the field of microsystem technologies in medicine and the life sciences, for which he was nominated for the German Founder’s Prize in 2004. He lead the Industry Group of the German Physical Society between 2004 and 2009, and is the current chair of the SPIE ‘‘Microfluidics, BioMEMS and Medical Microsystems’’ conference as well as co-chair for MicroTAS 2013. Besides serving on the Editorial Board of “Lab-on-a-Chip”, he is a member of the General Advisory Board of MANCEF (Micro and Nanotechnology Commercialization Education Foundation), the expert panel on “Security Research” of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology as well as several other advisory boards and is acting as a regular reviewer of project proposals on a national and international level.

In the second in our Introducing series, we’re very pleased to introduce Editorial Board member Helene Andersson Svahn to readers of the blog!

Helene Andersson Svahn received her M. Sc. in Molecular Biotechnology from Uppsala University and her Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology in 2001. In 2002-2005 Dr Andersson Svahn was Marketing Director at Silex Microsystems. In 2003 she was selected as member of the ‘TR100: Innovators under 35 who will create the future’ at MIT in USA. In 2005-2008 she was professor in Applied BIOMEMS at MESA+ Research Institute in Holland. In 2006 Prof Andersson Svahn was awarded a prestigious research fellowship from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 2011-2012 she was the President of the Young Academy of Sweden and she is also a member of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Currently she is heading the Nanobiotechnology division at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and CEO of the startup company Picovitro AB (part time). Her main research focus is micro- and nano-fluidic devices for biotech and medical applications.

In the first of a short series of blog posts introducing the newest members of the Lab on a Chip Editorial Board, here we are very pleased to welcome Yoon-Kyoung Cho:

Yoon-Kyoung Cho received her B.S. and M.S. in Chemical Engineering from POSTECH in South Korea in 1992 and 1994, respectively. She continued her studies in the USA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) where she received her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering in 1999 under the supervision of Prof. Steve Granick. Following her graduate work at UIUC, she returned to her homeland of South Korea and joined Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) as a senior research scientist. During her nine years at SAIT, she was involved in the research and development of a wide range of lab-on-a-chip technologies for biomedical applications, several of which have made it to the commercial marketplace.

In 2008, she returned to academia as an assistant professor in the school of Nano-Bioscience and Chemical Engineering at the Ulsan National Institute for Science and Technology (UNIST), South Korea and was promoted to associate professor in 2010. Since 2009, she has been the chair of her department and the director of an ambitious and prestigious program, the World Class University (WCU) program, geared to perform international research with leading scientists at UNIST. Her current research interests include novel micro/nano fluidic devices for advanced diagnostics, environmental monitoring, and cell biology. She has had a prolific career in academia and industry, publishing more than 38 scientific papers and 107 registered patents to date. 

Below, Professor Cho shares her views on Lab on a Chip, and the research areas she is working in currently: