Prof. Dan V. Nicolau
Chair of the Department of Bioengineering
Endowed Professor of Engineering
Prof. Nicolau is the founding Chair of McGill’s Department of Bioengineering at the Faculty of Engineering. He has degrees in Chemical Engineering (PhD, MEng) and in Statistics, Cybernetics & Information Technology (MSc). His research covered, chronologically, polymer chemistry and physico-chemistry, surface science and engineering, micro- and nanofabrication for semiconductor and biomedical devices, process modeling and control, molecular modeling, protein adsorption, and recently biomimetics.
Before joining academia in 2000, Dan V. Nicolau worked for more than 20 years in industry and industrial R&D environment, in Europe, Japan and Australia. Prior to moving to McGill, he was a professor at the University of Liverpool, UK; Monash and Swinburne Universities, Australia. Prof. Nicolau published more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, a similar number of full papers in conference proceedings and 6 book chapters. He edited a book on microarray technology, and co-edited the proceedings of 40 international conferences. Prof. Nicolau was the PI of research projects and research consortia, totaling more than $ 25 mil., granted by funding institutions in Europe, Japan, Australia, USA, UK, Brazil and Canada. He is an Editor of Biosensors & Bioelectronics, an Editor of Scientific Reports, a Fellow of the International Society of Optical Engineering (SPIE), and a Member of the Academy of Romanian Scientists and Engineers.
Xavier joined the McGill bioengineering department in August 2018 as the lab manager. He is in charge of our facilities, making sure that everything runs smoothly, from equipment to students. He obtained his master degree in biology from UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal), where he studied the expression of a protein linked to preeclampsia. He has experience with cellular and molecular biology, microvesicles and virology.
Ayyappasamy (Ayyappa) Sudalaiyadum Perumal
Ayyappa is a postdoctoral fellow and joined the team in December 2016. He was born in India, graduated from Anna University, India (2012). Later, he pursued his Ph.D. (2013 to 2016) from University of Montpellier and CNRS France as an Erasmus doctoral fellow. His expertises are in molecular biology, biochemistry, and microbiology. During the Ph.D., he studied bacterial transcription systems and regulations in Mycobacterium tuberculosis by in vitro methods. In our team he is pursuing to train bacteria for fitting our mathematical models, tracking and understanding the microbial behaviour in confined space.
Sara Kheireddine
( Ph.D. student)
Sara is a senior Ph.D. student from Lebanon/Canada, who joined the lab in June 2016. She did her undergraduate studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in Electrical and Computer Engineering and completed her Master’s degree at RWTH Aachen University in Biomedical Engineering. She did research for her Master’s thesis at Prof. David Juncker’s lab at McGill. She is currently working on using microorganisms as problem-solving agents for mathematical problems represented graphically using microfluidics.
Giulia Ippoliti
( Ph.D. student)
Giulia is a Phd candidate working in Biocomputation within the field of Bioengineering and Computer Science. This is a very exciting work that naturally came forward to her when she was going through her education and experiences in London, UK. She graduated in Mechanical Engineering and pursued a Master of Science in Bioengineering with Neurotechnology, thus a deep dive into Machine Learning and Neuroscience. She then worked in industry for two years as a Software Developer and sharpened her skills specifically in Scala, a powerful functional programming language. She would be working as a computation and simulation specialist in our team..
Monalisha Nayak
(Ph.D. student)
Monalisha is a Ph.D. student, who joined the group in September, 2017. She has completed her Masters Degree in Biotechnology from Ravenshaw University, Odisha, India. Prior to joining our team, she was working as a Research Fellow at different levels (junior and senior research scholar) in IIT, Bombay(IITB), India. She mastered different proteomics techniques as well as Molecular Biology techniques during the 3 years period at IITB. She also spent four years at IIT Kanpur, where her project mainly focused on the fabrication of microflidic chips, instrumentation related to microfabrication and image/data analysis. She would be working in our team as an experimental biologist and molecualr biologist. Her goals are to engineer microbes to suite the needs in different biocomputation and biosimulation networks.
Changjin Ryu (Justin)
(Master student)
Changjin is from South Korea and achieved his undergrad degree at Kyonggi University in Life Science and Bio-Food Technology. Changjin has engaged in creating nanoparticles and comparing their principle properties in Nano-Technology Laboratory and also has been involved in Biochemistry Laboratory to measure immune activities under the effects of specific polysaccharides and proteins for the launch of functional food. His main research interests are to manipulate the function of complex genetic and protein networks based on knowledge of intracellular and extracellular pathways. In addition to this, he is also interested in fabricating nanoparticles using combinatorial chemistry techniques for therapeutic applications. In order to do succeed in these fields, he is coming up with a variety of some approaches including microfluidics, bioinformatics.
Prasad Shetty
(Master student)
Prasad is from India with his undergraduate degree in Biotechnology from R. V. College of Engineering (Bangalore, India). Prasad was studying the role of shear stress in the biophysical response of endothelial cells in Indian Institute of Science (IISc, Bangalore, India) during his undergraduate studies. After graduation, Prasad worked as a research fellow at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) on paper-based microfluidics for point-of-care applications and on the lysis and isothermal amplification of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Prasad is currently pursuing his master’s at McGill with his research interest in protein adsorption.
Hsin-Yu Lin (Jamee)
Jamee is from Taiwan and completed her undergrad degree at National Central University in Mechanical Engineering in 2012. During the time at the University, Jamee has been involved in a bio-actuator project by applying bacteria inside the microfludics channels to propel microstructures. After graduation, Jamee spent one year at National Tsing Hua University as a research assistant working on an artificial retina project. Jamee is now persuing her master degree at McGill. Her research is focused on bacterial behavior and space searching algorithm in microfluics devices.
Viola is from Slovakia (Michalovce) and joined the lab as a postdoc in February 2015. She obtained her PhD diploma at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague, Czech Republic. Viola has a background in Chemical Engineering (Master and PhD work) and Physics (Bachelor work). Her main research focus is in the field of particle technology – nano- and micro-particles for drug delivery, antimicrobial particles, temperature-sensitive particles, adhesion studies (antibody-antigen interactions, particle-substrate interaction inside fluid-flow condition), granulation process (high-shear wet granulation, API distribution and porosity) and microfluidics in connection to biocomputation and biosimulation experiments using bacteria.
Ondřej is a postdoctoral fellow and joined the lab in February 2015 together with Viola. He was born in Czech Republic (Karlovy Vary) and he moved to Prague in 2005. He obtained his doctoral degree at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague, Czech Republic. During his PhD he studied encapsulation of active substances by spray drying, development of intelligent multi-responsive fertilizers and investigation of dissolution process by UV/VIS spectroscopy combined with time-resolved computed tomography. Currently, he is involved in simulation of wetting phenomena at micro/nano-scale, micro-fabrication, CAD modelling and particle tracking.
Kathryn (Kate) Clancy
(Master student)
Kate is from Toronto, Ontario and completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Guelph in Biochemistry. Within the co-op program at Guelph, she held positions within Health Canada at both the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) where she was assessing the efficacy of a new pesticide metabolite database; and the Health Products and Food Branch (HPFB) working on a protocol to better isolate Shigella from food samples. Kate also secured a co-op term in beautiful Lyon, France working at the Centre de Recherche en Neurosciences de Lyon (CRNL) in the SLEEP team where she was developing a rat model for muscle atonia during paradoxial sleep. Kate came to McGill in 2013 to pursue a Masters degree in Biomedical Engineering. She is investigating how different surface chemistries and patterning techniques affect the adsorption of proteins on a flat surface under the supervision of Prof. Dan V. Nicolau and Prof. David Juncker.
Camellia Ganjoury
(PhD student)
Camellia came from Iran where she studied Biomedical Engineering at Amirkabir University of Technology - Tehran Polytechnic.