Rashid Bashir, Ph.D.
Department of Bioengineering, Holonyak Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory, Grainger College of Engineering
Carle Illinois College of Medicine
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Intersection of Engineering and Biology at the Micro and Nanoscale: Opportunities for Personalized Diagnostics and Printing Cellular Machines"
Integration of biology, medicine, and engineering and especially 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. Specifically, microfluidics and Lab-on-Chip can realize applications in detection of disease markers, counting of specific cells from whole blood, and for identification of nucleic acids using sensitive and specific, point-of-care and personalized technologies. The implication of these technologies for advancing personalized medicine for diagnosis of infection and stratification of sepsis would be discussed. Moving up the scale from nanotechnology and microfluidics, 3D bio-fabrication methods for biohybrid polymer devices can also be used to develop instrumented tissues for drug screening and biohybrid robotics.
BIO
Rashid Bashir is Professor of Bioengineering, the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering, and is currently the Dean of Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has also been the Department Head of Bioengineering and the Director of the Holonyak Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He was a member of the core founding team and co-chair of the inaugural curriculum committee for the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, the world’s first engineering-based College of Medicine at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He has previously been at Purdue University and at the National Semiconductor Corporation as Sr. Engineering Manager. He has held a Visiting Scientist position at Massachusetts General Hospital and Shriner’s Hospital for Children and was a Visiting Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, MA. He was the recipient of the Joel and Spira Teaching Award, the NSF Faculty Early Career Award and the IEEE EMBS Technical Achievement Award. In 2018, he received the Pritzker Distinguished Lectureship Award from BMES.
His research group is interested in developing new diagnostic technologies for precision and personalized medicine and in 3D bio-fabrication of cellular systems. Using bionanotechnology, BioMEMS, and lab on chip, he is working at the interface of biology and engineering from the molecular to the tissue scale and aiming to make an impact on grand challenges in infectious disease, sepsis, cancer, and others. He has authored or co-authored over 300 journal papers and has been granted 55 patents. He holds fellowships of IEEE, BMES, AIMBE, APS, IAMBE, NAI, RSC, and AAAS. Technology from his group has been licensed to BioVitesse, and Daktari and he has co-founded biotech startups Prenosis, Inc. and VedaBio, Inc. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and National Academy of Inventors.