Speakers 

Dr. Nancy L. Allbritton joined the University of Washington as the Frank & Julie Jungers Dean of Engineering in November 2019. In that capacity, she serves as the chief academic officer of the college and provides leadership to over 279 faculty and more than 8,000 students. The College of Engineering is a top-15 nationally ranked public university program with annual research expenditures exceeding $159 million.

Allbritton is an international expert on multiplexed single-cell assays, microfabricated platforms for high-content cytometry combined with cell sorting, and microengineered stem-cell-based systems for recapitulating human organ-level function. Four companies have been formed based on her research discoveries: Protein Simple (acquired by Bio-Techne in 2014), Intellego, Cell Microsystems, and Altis Biosystems. Allbritton holds an appointment in the UW’s Department of Bioengineering.  She has been nationally recognized for her research and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute for Medical & Biological Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors.

Prior to joining the UW, Allbritton led the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University which spans two universities and three colleges.   

Dino Di Carlo received his B.S. in Bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002 and received a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco in 2006. From 2006-2008 he conducted postdoctoral studies in the Center for Engineering in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has been on the faculty in the Department of Bioengineering at UCLA since 2008 and now as Professor of Bioengineering serves as the Vice Chair of the Department and Deputy Director of an NSF Engineering Research Center focused on diagnostics for underserved populations. In 2019 he was named the Armond and Elena Hairapetian Chair Professor in Engineering and Medicine at UCLA. His research pioneered the use of inertial fluid dynamic effects for the control, separation, and analysis of cells in microfluidic devices. His recent work extends into numerous other fields of biomedicine and biotechnology including lab-on-a-particle technologies, directed evolution of cells, rapid diagnostics, mechanomedicine, smart biomaterials, and phenotypic drug screening. He has also been a leader in technology entrepreneurship: He co-founded several companies that are commercializing UCLA intellectual property developed in his lab including CytoVale, Tempo Therapeutics, Forcyte Biotechnologies, and Partillion Bioscience. Among other honors he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2016, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) in 2014, was awarded the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development award and the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award, the Packard Fellowship and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award, and received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award and Coulter Translational Research Award.

Amy E. Herr, Ph.D. is the MacArthur Professor at UC Berkeley, where she directs a bioengineering research group that addresses unmet measurement needs spanning fundamental life sciences (developmental biology) to clinical practice (oncology). At the interface of microsystems design, analytical chemistry, and protein science, her group designs precision microsystems to study biology, with a focus on targeted proteomic tools offering single-cell and subcellular resolution. Her research advances the “mathematization” of biology and medicine. She was a staff scientist at Sandia National Laboratories. She is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, is an NIH New Innovator, NSF CAREER awardee, Sloan Research Fellow, Ellen Weaver Awardee (AWIS) for mentoring, UC Berkeley’s Outstanding Postdoc Advisor Award, and a City of Berkeley Visionary Awardee, among others.  She sits on the NIH’s National Advisory Council for Bioengineering, the DARPA Biological Insights Board, and is on the Academic Council of the Schmidt Science Fellows. At UC Berkeley she directs the Bakar Fellows Program and the Bakar BioEnginuity Hub (opening 2022). Professor Herr has chaired three of the major scientific meetings in her field, is a successful entrepreneur with nearly 40 issued patents, and has been recognized for her advising and mentoring.

Professor John A. Rogers obtained BA and BS degrees in chemistry and in physics from the University of Texas, Austin, in 1989.  From MIT, he received SM degrees in physics and in chemistry in 1992 and the PhD degree in physical chemistry in 1995.  From 1995 to 1997, Rogers was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard University Society of Fellows.  He joined Bell Laboratories as a Member of Technical Staff in the Condensed Matter Physics Research Department in 1997, and served as Director of this department from the end of 2000 to 2002.  He then spent thirteen years on the faculty at University of Illinois, most recently as the Swanlund Chair Professor and Director of the Seitz Materials Research Laboratory.  In the Fall of 2016, he joined Northwestern University as the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Medicine, with affiliate appointments in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering and Chemistry, where he is also Director of the recently endowed Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics.  He has published more than 750 papers, is a co-inventor on more than 100 patents and he has co-founded several successful technology companies.  His research has been recognized by many awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship (2009), the Lemelson-MIT Prize (2011), the Smithsonian Award for American Ingenuity in the Physical Sciences (2013), the MRS Medal (2018), the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute (2019) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021).  He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.