Bruce Gale

Director of the Center of Excellence for Biomedical Microfluidics

Bruce K. Gale,Gale received his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from Brigham Young University in 1995 and his PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Utah in 2000. He was an assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering at Louisiana Tech University before returning to the University of  Utah in 2001 where he is now a professor of Mechanical Engineering. He is currently Director of both the Utah State Center of Excellence for Biomedical Microfluidics and the College of Engineering Nanofabrication Facility. He is also Chief Science Officer at Wasatch Microfluidics, a multiplexed instrument development company focused on protein characterization in the pharmaceutical industry that was spun out of his lab in 2005. He has three additional recent startups where he serves as chief scientist: Espira, which focuses on pathogen detection and exosome separations; Nanonc, which focuses on reproductive medicine applications of microfluidics; and Microsurgical Innovations, which focuses on miniature medical devices. He has been working in the area of microfluidics, nanotechnology, medical devices, and micro-total-analysis systems (-TAS) for the past 18 years. His primary interests include lab-on- a chip devices that require a variety of microfluidic components for the completion of complex and challenging medical and biological assays. Specifically, he is working to develop a microfluidic toolbox for the rapid design, simulation, and fabrication of devices with medical and biological applications. The ultimate goal is to develop platforms for personalized medicine, which should allow medical treatments to be customized to the needs of individual patients. He also has expertise in nanoscale patterning of proteins and sensors, nanoparticle characterization, miniature medical devices, and nanofabrication techniques.

Himanshu Sant

Research Assistant Professor

Project: Microscale Electrical FFF

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I am a research assistant professor currently involved in developing field flow fractionation (FFF) based microchromatography systems and on-chip detection schemes for the development of basic platform for micro total analysis systems. Micro separation systems under study are capable of separating soluble and colloidal sample ranging from few nanometers to several microns and can be used for detection and size analysis or sample preparation for further downstream processing. These 25 mm in height, 2 mm wide and 5 cm long FFF devices use a variety of driving force which include electrical, thermal, dielectrophoretic in combination or alone. My work is related to devise the experimental methods to study not so well understood aspects of these systems, improvement in existing systems and development of new products.


Masters Thesis: Improved Scaling Models for Electrical FFF 

Raheel Samuel

Post Doctoral Researcher

I am a post doc working in mechanical engineering. I love to use basic science to build engineering solutions. Furthermore, I  enjoy interdisciplinary research as it is fun to learn from others and work with them to overcome challenges.

Because of these aspirations, microfluidics as a very interdisciplinary field has served me very well. My research in microfluidics focuses on designing simple and cost-effective replica molding methods for making microfluidic devices out of Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). PDMS is a very popular biocompatible elastomer used to make microfluidic devices for biomedical applications. Replica molding is a set of fabrication techniques used to make microfluidic devices.

With this research focus I have designed simple and cost-effective replica molding protocols to make a microdevice used to calibrate Magnetic Resonance Imaging systems, a microvalve array for high throughput genetic screens of nematodes for neuronal-behavior analysis, and a microfluidic device used to genotype 1-2 day old zebrafish embryos without having any effect on embryos’ health.