We welcome Dr. Nate Cira from the Rowland Institute at Harvard.

"Biomedical Microdevices and Synthetic Microbial Communities"

Abstract: In the first part of this two-part talk I’ll cover three examples of microdevices that leverage different physical mechanisms to address biomedical challenges: A self-loading device using stored vacuum energy to test minimum inhibitory concentrations of antibiotics and species type bacterial pathogens, another device where confinement of a heated elastomer is used to create on-chip valves for portable liquid control, and a system exploiting surface tension driven effects to create responsive droplets. In the second part of the talk, I’ll discuss the creation of a simple synthetic microbial community by genetic barcoding and experiments on this community designed to investigate how theories of ecology apply to the microbial world. Depending on the migration fraction and size of fitness differences either neutral or selective models are best used to capture the results, with implications for the forces at play in maintaining microbial diversity in communities such as the human microbiome.

Bio: Nate completed undergraduate majors in biomedical engineering, biology, biochemistry, microbiology, and molecular biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011. He received his masters in 2013 and his PhD in 2017 from Stanford University where he was a member of the Quake lab. He has worked on projects involving microbiology, microfluidic devices, community ecology, capillarity and wetting, and network theory. He was an Evans Scholar, NSF GRFP Recipient, and a Siebel Scholar. He started the Cira lab as a Rowland Fellow at the Rowland Institute in late 2017. ​