Microsystems have the potential to impact biology & medicine by providing new ways to manipulate, separate, and otherwise interrogate cells and the molecules they secrete. The immune system is of particular interest because of its central role in the pathophysiology of many common disorders. As a consequence, many microfluidic devices have been developed to study both the basic biology of immune cells as well as to assay them for clinical use. Our lab has developed technologies on both ends of the spectrum, from cell pairing devices able to study information flow and decision-making in immune cells, to electrical sorting devices for assaying immune cell function in response to disease, to electrochemical microfluidic systems for assaying protein abundance in complex fluids. In this talk I will highlight some of our recent developments in this area to showcase the opportunities – and enduring challenges – of these microfluidic tools.
Joel Voldman is William R. Brody (1965) Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1995. He received the M.S and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, in 1997 and 2001, developing bioMEMS for single-cell analysis. Following this, he was a postdoctoral associate at Harvard Medical School. In 2002 he returned to MIT as an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at MIT. Prof. Voldman’s research focuses on developing microfluidic technology for biology and medicine, with an emphasis on cell sorting, manipulation, and measurement. In 2006 he was promoted to Associate Professor, and in 2013 promoted to Professor in the department. In 2018 he became Associate Head of the Department and from 2020-2025 was Faculty Head for Electrical Engineering. Among several awards, he has received an NSF CAREER award, an ACS Young Innovator Award, a Bose Research award, Jamieson Teaching Award, Smullin Teaching Award, Quick Faculty Research Innovation Fellowship, AIMBE Fellow, IEEE Fellow, RSC Fellow, and awards for posters and presentations at international conferences.