Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/26/2015
3:00 pm

Rashid Bashir, Ph.D., Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering and Bioengineering Department Head, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Please also join us for a reception honoring Dr. Bashir at 4:00pm in the Biomedical Sciences Building atrium!

Abstract:

Integration of biology, medicine, and fabrication methods at the micro and nano scale offers tremendous opportunities for solving important problems in biology and medicine and to enable a wide range of applications in diagnostics, therapeutics, and tissue engineering. Microfluidics and Lab-on-Chip can be very beneficial to realize practical applications in detection of disease markers, counting of specific cells from whole blood, and for identification of pathogens, at point-of-care. The use of small sample size and electrical methods for sensitive analysis of target entities can result in easy to use, one-time-use assays that can be used at point-of-care. In this talk, we will present our work on detection of T cells for diagnostics of HIV AIDs for global health, development of a CBC (Complete Blood Cell) analysis on a chip, electrical detection of multiplexed nucleic acid amplification reactions, and detection of epigenetic markers on DNA at the single molecule level. While the above mentioned devices are built with PDMS or silicon, bio-printing with stereolithography can be a very powerful technology to produce bio-hybrid devices made of polymers and cells such as biological machines and soft robotics. These devices could have potential applications in drug delivery, power generation, and other biomimetic systems.

Brief Bio:

Rashid Bashir is the Abel Bliss Professor and Head of the Department Head of Bioengineering at UIUC since August 2013. He also holds adjunct appointments in Mechanical Science and Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering. He completed his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1992. From Oct 1992 to Oct 1998, he worked at National Semiconductor in the Analog/Mixed Signal Process Technology Development Group where he was promoted to Sr. Engineering Manager. He joined Purdue University in Oct 1998 as Assistant Professor and was later promoted to Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Courtesy Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. From Oct 2007 to Aug 2013, he was the Abel Bliss Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering & Bioengineering, Director of the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory (a campus wide clean room facility) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Director of the campus-side Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, a collaboratory aimed to facilitate center grants and large initiatives around campus in the area of nanotechnology.

He has authored or co-authored over 200 journal papers, over 200 conference papers and conference abstracts, over 120 invited talks, and has been granted 37 patents. He is a fellow of IEEE, AIMBE, AAAS, AIMBE, APS and BMES. His research interests include BioMEMS, Lab on a chip, nano-biotechnology, interfacing biology and engineering from molecular to tissue scale, and applications of semiconductor fabrication to biomedical engineering, all applied to solve biomedical problems. He has been involved in 2 startups that have licensed his technologies. Hs the PI on an NSF IGERT on Cellular and Molecular Mechanics and Bionanotechnology and PI on an NIH Training Grant on Cancer Nanotechnology. He is also a campus lead on an NSF Science and Technology Center on Emergent Behavior of Integrated Biological Systems (head quartered at MIT, and partners at GT and UIUC).