Scientific Advisors

Stephen Quake, Ph.D.

Dr. Quake studied physics (B.S., 1991) and mathematics (M.S., 1991) at Stanford University before earning his doctorate in physics from Oxford University (1994) as a Marshall scholar. He then spent two years as a post-doc in Nobel Laureate Steven Chu's group at Stanford University developing techniques to manipulate single DNA molecules with optical tweezers. In 1996, Dr. Quake joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology, where he rose through the ranks and was ultimately appointed the Thomas and Doris Everhart Professor of Applied Physics and Physics. Dr. Quake moved back to Stanford University in 2004 to help launch a new department in Bioengineering, of which he is now Co-Chair.

Dr. Quake's interests lie at the nexus of physics, biology and biotechnology. Over the past half-decade, he has focused on understanding the basic physics and biological applications of microfluidic technology. His group pioneered the development of Microfluidic Large Scale Integration (LSI), demonstrating the first integrated microfluidic devices with thousands of mechanical valves. This technology is helping to pave the way for large-scale automation of biology at the nanoliter scale, and he and his students have been exploring applications of "lab on a chip" technology in functional genomics, genetic analysis, and protein design. Throughout his career, Dr. Quake has also been active in the field of single molecule biophysics; he has focused on precision measurements on single molecules, and in 2003, his group demonstrated the first successful single molecule DNA sequencing experiments.

Dr. Quake received "Career" and "First" awards from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health in 1997, was named a Packard Fellow in 1999, was in the inaugural class of NIH Director's Pioneer Awards in 2004, and in 2005 was selected as an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His contributions to the development of new biotechnology at the interface between physics and biology have been recognized by recent awards from MIT's Technology Review, Forbes, and Popular Science.