 It's my great pleasure to introduce Dr. Jackie Linnis today. She's the Marta E. Gross Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering here at Purdue University. And she is the director of the schools Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. It's part of the leadership team and her leadership in the school. Her work covers a number of areas related to diagnostics, emphasizes the application of fundamental microfluidic principles and biological assays to develop point-of-care diagnostics, global health, and wearable diagnostics. This research in the lab focuses on advanced paper microfluidics, molecular biosensors, human-centered instrumentation designed to enable sensitive, robust, rapid diagnostics. Spice at the Shea, her lab didn't shut down at all during COVID because she had a lot of work to do on developing technologies to help with applying some of her technologies in that light just in time. She has won numerous awards, including the Violet Haas Fellowship, the More Inventor Fellow Awards and is supported by a number of grants, including NIH, R01, NIH DP2, NSF, and other types of sources of funding of her lab, totaling more than $6 million thus far. In addition to this, she has extensive experience in translational research, including co-founding and managing early-stage user feedback for three small companies. And leading user response assessments with engineers without borders in Bolivia. She has co-developed mobile diagnostics where both devices, airborne pathogen and activation tools and water purification technologies with users in the US, Nicaragua, Kenya, Zambia and Haiti. She applies these experiences in her teaching of undergraduate design, graduate-level instrumentation, measurement and point-of-care diagnostics and workshops around the world. Fun fact, she's also one of the BME programs, first alum before she became a Purdue University, she got her BS in interdisciplinary engineering in Purdue University and then went on to do a PhD in bioengineering with a graduate certificate in global health in the University of Washington. After that, she was a Fogarty Engineering Fellow, collaboration between Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard School of Public Health and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before continuing her postdoc in training in point-of-care diagnostics at Boston University in Dr. Catherine Clapperich's lab. So we are thrilled to have her in the school and she has some time this year, some of her work with us today. Thank you. Thank you all so much. I'm really appreciative of this opportunity to talk a little bit about my journey into developing point-of-care molecular diagnostics and I think it all started when I was here as an undergraduate at Purdue and I got interested in engineering because not because I liked puzzles, which I did or because I got to solve problems, which was fun, but because there's a social good aspect to it and that's what really drew me to be excited about this and my journey through my PhD and my postdoc was around developing technologies for global health and developing understanding infectious disease detection and in my free time at the time, honestly, it was working with Roots Young Adult Center and homeless shelter nearby. I learned informally stakeholder analyses which is talking to people about what are their needs and then now being able to develop rapid diagnostics and platforms that can then address needs once you really know what those are. And so my lab has gone in many directions doing all kinds of exciting work based on this user-centered design framework that we've been developing, responding to what are the needs of the users and how do we address those and how do our technologies work for people or not? So we have lots of different technologies, lots of different diseases, but I'm most excited about talking about this first one because it really comes back around from the project that I proposed in my faculty application, the first project that was ever funded by the SHA lab for global iterations, which was here at Purdue and then soon followed by a Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Explorations Grant and has now come back around for the More Inventor Fellowship and other solutions to get this out the door. So this project and all of my projects focus around healthcare access points and the fact that there is a trade-off between the accuracy, affordability and accessibility if you want to reach any of these levels. And so we focus exclusively when we can on the community level which has the most accessibility but has challenges with affordability and accuracy with most diagnostics. And so as an example, the rapid diagnostic tests that you might know for COVID or for a pregnancy test they're affordable and they're accessible but as far as accuracy goes there's a lot left to be desired. And in contrast, there's nucleic acid tests which are very accurate but this $10,000 machine with $50 cartridges is not terribly affordable. And given the fact that it needs to sit on a bench it's not terribly accessible. So there is this need that we have looked to solve which is to combine the simplicity of handheld rapid diagnostic tests with the sensitivity and the specificity of these nucleic acid diagnostics. And so my lab has developed a few different technologies for this from wax valves to control fluid flow to being able to do viral capture and Lysis and the nucleic acid amplification to make billions of copies when there are very few targets to look for inside of paper-like membranes and as well as integrating this all into a package that you can move downstream which I left on the bench over there but we've gotten a number of publications and some patents out of this. Yeah, please pass it around, that would be great. And it's a need to tell you that I have a conflict of interest because I have started a small company to translate this technology ever to diagnostics but I've also started two other companies and co-founding Omniviz, Inc. and Rescue Biomedical LLC because in my experience, developing a technology and it's sitting on my lab bench doesn't help anybody. So I've been really invested in getting technologies up and out the door. And our solution is this little smartphone powered prototype that is getting passed around that has integrated everything that we have been working on into one little package. And for the user, despite all the complicated technical things going on behind the scenes, the user takes a sample, adds it to the inlet and then adds some wash buffer which is much like you would for your COVID test, fold it up and then when you plug it in it automatically heats and then they wait for 30 to 90 minutes until it's done but it goes through all of the steps on its own and the user just has to look at two lines for a positive or one line for a negative. And so it's very easy on the user side and we've demonstrated this first with HIV which was the Gates Foundation funding to capture HIV from blood, perform RNA amplification and then detection in a visual readout and all of that is happening here with two lines for a positive sample and one line for a negative sample. And this has brought us to develop this type of rapid diagnostic platform and then as we go to translate it and as we have developed these different technologies we found lots of other fun directions to take. And so clinical and stakeholder evaluations to go back to the individuals that we're designing for making sure that this fits their needs. We've got collaborations in public health and across the world that we're working with in social sciences, distributed diagnostics and manufacturing at scale. It turns out these devices aren't designed for existing manufacturing. So we have to develop new aspects and new pick in place and robotics and other aspects that could be designed and produced if we design them right so that we can make these technologies anywhere in the world and they're not limited to the high resource, high volume technologies but we have to develop good controls and good quantification and other aspects that go around this packaging. And then we've also gotten really interested in some fundamental flow in paper and really going back to the basics of what is happening at these reaction sites, what is happening in the biology and the engineering. And so these are some of the directions we're going and we hope that there will be many more as we move forward. And of course, none of this happens without the people that do the real work. In my lab, I started with up in the corner four PhD students and two undergraduate students. My first year, it was a lot to take on your first year but they have been fantastic. It's grown to six PhDs, graduated 14 members of the lab, one postdoc, three master's students and 55 undergraduates that I have gotten the privilege to work with. And it's been amazing. And I am learning every day from these individuals. Part of what we do is we take our research outside the lab. So we have a research lab, it's beautiful, I love it. But in order to find out if things are gonna work and what the needs are, we go out and talk to collaborators. And so over here in developing a newborn warming and vital signs monitoring, we went to Riley Children's Hospital to understand from the neonatologists what is happening and what are their needs. And the graduate students, the undergraduate students really get out and see what's happening in the world. And then even when we can't travel, this is a device designed to work in Haiti and Kenya and I can't take everybody there but we can go to the pond in my backyard and find out what does and doesn't work for a water testing device. And so here we're finding out that the clear plastic chips are almost invisible in the sun that the iPhone screen up here doesn't actually show the fluorescent nanoparticles because they bleach in the sun. And so these are things that we would never have found out in a research lab because we have wonderful lighting conditions. So getting out of the lab has been really critical in finding challenges both big and small that are important to solve. And then I brought that into my teaching as well. What I'm passionate about which is that engineering for social good I find that students are equally passionate about this if not more. And so I've been able to do this work teaching our capstone design series at the junior and senior levels was able to be a Purdue Impact Fellow to redesign our senior lab and professional development courses to make them really integrated. And then also have had the privilege of working in Ecuador on a study abroad that has gone for spring breaks past in medical needs finding and design for the users. So those undergraduate courses have been fantastic. I love teaching my graduate course on point of care diagnostics because that is my passion and it's great to spread that to students as well. And my soapbox of biomedical measurement in making technologies robust and repeatable and how you do that in a squishy biological situation when you can't engineer everything to perfect specifications. And then internationally I've gotten to do workshops. This is AIBBC is the Africa International Biotechnology and Biomedical Conference where I get to teach point of care diagnostics to researchers who work in laboratories on problems that in some cases I have never heard of because of my sitting here in a high resource setting but helping them to translate their technology or their biological solutions into technologies that they can use. And then also on the other end working with microfluidics researchers and teaching them about human-centered design and getting them out of the lab and bringing these two communities closer together. I could not possibly do this without an immense number of mentors and supporters along the way. I was trying to figure out the best way to present this and what came to me was the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity has a mentor map that you make and it has all of these bubbles and it turns out none of the people fit next to their bubbles because there are so many of them but people who really helped before I was at Purdue or my first time at Purdue as undergrad and then people that have provided me sponsorship and opportunities while I've been here as well as those who have provided me professional development and role models and colleagues for this intellectual community which is an amazing place to be and emotional support as well to make it through this tenure process. So in particular thanks to collaborators who not only invested in me but also invested their time and funders who invested their funding sources in getting these projects up and running and out the door. And last but in no way these are the people that I get to come home with every night and these guys keep me sane and remind me what really matters and so thank you to them and thank you to the people that helped me take care of them because that is also a village. Thank you all for your time as well. How do you reinvent manufacturing at scale? Do you have any IE collaborations? So we have been working with the Burke Nanotechnology Facility and manufacturing there and we're also yeah, reaching out to people in IE we'd love to talk more but we're looking at what works in electronics manufacturing which is pick and place electronics rather than the role to role manufacturing that's done in paper. And so that's a possibility it's a much cheaper medium throughput we can get a robot for less than $50,000 we can't get a real to real manufacturing facility for less than a million dollars. And so on our way to scale up we're looking at how do we make all of these little tiny parts which have to come together and electronics has been really successful at that. So that's our first thought. Forgive me if you get asked this too much but there are no, this has been in the news again because of the trial. It just strikes me how much like this is the real version. And I just wonder as someone who's doing a startup now are you, does that impact your ability to start your company? And how do you experience the fallout of that? Oh yes, absolutely. So Theranos has been in the news again for less than ideal practices. And the first company that we started out of Purdue Omniviz was started by a PhD student and then postdoc Dr. Catherine Clayton who has translated the technology and she spent much of that time over the last four years explaining how Omniviz culture is the exact opposite. It is transparent, we publish and we work really hard for people to understand what we're doing in the world because investment in microfluidic technologies has not been real popular. Oh, and our stuff works. Thank you. All right, thank you everyone for, thank you Jackie for this great presentation.