Currently, many medical diagnostic procedures are inefficient and inaccessible to a large population in the world because these procedures require advanced and expensive testing equipment as well as labor-intensive protocols to be carried out by a trained technician. Here, we present a versatile platform technology designed for point-of-care diagnostics which uses magnetic levitation to separate cells on the basis of their densities and measure the density distribution of the cells in a patient sample. We have demonstrated its versatility in the ability to measure density change in cells for a range of diagnostic applications including sickle cell disease diagnosis, white blood cell cytometry, and rare object detection in biological samples.

Biography:
Dr. Savas Tasoglu joined the University of Connecticut in 2014 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in 2011 from UC Berkeley, with a research focus on transport phenomena and pharmacokinetics of anti-HIV microbicide drug delivery. Dr. Tasoglu held a postdoctoral appointment at Harvard Medical School and Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology until he joined UConn in 2014. His current research interests are: point-of-care diagnostic devices, bioprinting, magnetic focusing and levitation. His work has been featured at the cover of Advanced Materials, Small, Trends in Biotechnology, and Physics of Fluids and highlighted in Nature, Nature Physics, Nature Medicine, Boston Globe, Reuters Health, and Boston Magazine.