Bioengineering

From finger prick tests for blood glucose monitoring to industrial-scale drug screening in pharmaceutical companies, the ability to extract information from scarce volumes of samples quickly and cheaply is key to effective disease management and drug discovery. To this end, microfluidics offers major advantages over conventional liquid handling due to drastic reduction in reagent volume and the precise control of single cells, microtissues, and their microenvironments. The micro-nano-bio lab under the direction of Dr.

We develop data-driven, multiplexed methods to elucidate fundamental principles about how the living world works. We use the knowledge from these insights to develop cell-free biotechnologies for decentralized biomanufacturing, portable diagnostics, and educational kits to serve human needs. A key feature of our work is an emphasis on advancing and applying our capacity to partner with biology to make what is needed, where and when it is needed, on a sustainable and renewable basis.

With a creative, collaborative, biophysical mindset, we aim to understand the ability of parasites to interface with their host-cell to a point at which we can exploit the mechanisms not only for finding cures against the disease the parasites cause but also to make parasite mechanisms a tool that we can use to engineer the host’s cells. By developing approaches that allow a quantitative understanding and manipulation of molecular transport our research transforms parasites from agents of disease to tools for health.

Postdoctoral Research Fellow – Cell biology & microfluidics, UCSF & Stanford

Synthetic biology in plants and their associated microbes with the goal of driving innovation in agriculture for a sustainable future.

We work on technology development for genome engineering, discovery-focused synthetic biology, and epigenetic gene therapy. We aim to develop new technologies for studying the mammalian genome and treating complex diseases.

The Hernandez-Lopez Lab works at the interface of mechanistic, synthetic, and systems biology to understand and program cellular recognition, communication, and organization. We are currently interested in engineering biomedical relevant cellular behaviors for cancer immunotherapy. We are also launching new multidisciplinary projects.

The research interests of the molecular imaging instrumentation lab are to create novel instrumentation and software algorithms for in vivo imaging of molecular signatures of disease in humans and small laboratory animals. These new cameras efficiently image radiation emissions in the form of positrons, annihilation photons, gamma rays, and/or light emitted from molecular contrast agents that were introduced into the body and distributed in the subject tissues.