People

Professor Fan obtained his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Peking University and his Ph.D. in physics and optics from Oregon Center for Optics at the University of Oregon. Beginning his career in industry, he was a project leader at 3M on fiber optics and photonic sensing devices for biomedical applications. In 2004, he joined the Department of Biological Engineering at the University of Missouri as an assistant professor. In 2010, he joined the Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of Michigan as an associate professor and in 2014 was promoted to Professor. Professor Fan’s research includes photonic bio/chemical sensors, micro/nano-fluidics, and nano-photonics for disease diagnostics and bio/chemical molecule analysis. Prof. Fan has served as Associate Editor for Optics Express and currently serves on the Editorial Board for Lab on a Chip and Advisory Board of Advanced Materials Technologies. He is a recipient of the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund Award for Young Faculty, the Wallace H. Coulter Early Career Award (Phase I and Phase II), and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. His research is supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, private foundations, and industrial companies. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and Royal Society of Chemistry. He is the current Co-director of the Microfluidics in Biomedical Sciences Training Program at the University of Michigan.

Nicolas Mesyngier received his B.S. in Engineering Science from the Pennsylvania State University in 2017. He is currently a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan working in Prof. Ryan Bailey’s lab and co-advised by Prof. Katsuo Kurabayashi. Nico is interested in developing and interfacing optical sensing platforms with droplet microfluidics for biomedical applications.

Nadab Wubshet graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with his B.S. in mechanical engineering and mathematics with a minor in physics in 2018. He is currently a second year PhD student working at the Liu Lab. His research interest is in developing minimal synthetic cells and currently working on mechanosensitive actin network reconstitution inside cell-sized vesicles, and he uses microfluidic devices to mechanically characterize different actin networks.

Benjamin Yang graduated from the University of California, San Diego in 2017 with his B.S. in Bioengineering: Biotechnology and is now a PhD candidate in Prof. Carlos Aguilar's lab pursuing a dual degree in Biomedical Engineering and Scientific Computing. His research focuses on applying single-cell sequencing methods to uncover the mechanisms by which cellular interactions effect changes in cellular plasticity.

Emma Purcell graduated from the University of California San Diego in 2015 with her B.S. in Chemical Engineering. She entered the University of Michigan in 2016 to pursue her PhD under the co-advisement of Dr. Sunitha Nagrath and Dr. Heather Mayes. Her work focuses on using microfluidic devices to determine the diagnostic and treatment monitoring potential of circulating biomarkers in non-small cell lung cancer patients.

Owen Puls received his Bachelor's degree at a small liberal arts college in Minnesota, St. Olaf. He is a third year Physics PhD student at the University of Michigan in Dr. Qiong Yang's lab. He studies mitotic trigger waves in one and two dimensions using both computational and experimental methods. Owen's research interests extend to numerous topics in complex systems, dominated by a principal focus on disorder and its effect on otherwise well understood physical phenomena.

Sarah Ackenhusen graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2018 with her B.S. in Chemistry with a minor in Mathematics. She is currently a second year Chemical Biology doctoral student working in the Alison Narayan lab. Her current work focuses on enzyme engineering for biocatalysis, in an effort to create panels of enzymes for use in difficult chemical transformations.