Catherine M. Klapperich

Catherine Klapperich is the Associate Dean for Research and the Director of the NIBIB POCTRN Center for Future Technologies in Cancer Care at Boston University (BU). She is a Kern Innovation Faculty Fellow and an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. She was named the Dorf-Ebner Distinguished Faculty Fellow in 2014. She also holds appointments with the Division of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She is the Director of the Laboratory for Diagnostics and Global Healthcare Technologies and a member of the Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. In 2014, she was elected as a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. She is also a Guest Faculty Member in the Global Health Delivery Project at Harvard University. She received the B.S. degree in materials science and engineering from Northwestern University, the M.S. degree in engineering sciences from Harvard University, and the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 2000 with Dr. L. Pruitt and Dr. K. Komvopoulos. Before coming to Boston, she was a post-doctoral Fellow with the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in the lab of Dr. C. Bertozzi, and was a Senior Research Scientist with Aclara Biosciences, Mountain View, CA. Dr. Klapperich’s research is focused on engineering medical devices for use in low-resource settings and at the point of care. Current projects are focused on disposable microfluidic diagnostics that incorporate on-board sample preparation and on minimally instrumented devices to enable molecular diagnostics. Her work includes diagnostics for infectious diarrhea, respiratory infections, HIV, and other sexually transmitted diseases. These devices have been tested in Nicaragua and Kenya. Other work in the lab is focused on the design and deployment of devices to enable systems biology approaches to studying complex diseases including tuberculosis. Dr. Klapperich’s lab is funded by grants from the NIH, DoD, CIMIT, and the Coulter Foundation. In 2010, she was an Invited Participant in the National Academies of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering conference held in Agra, India. She serves on the Editorial Board of Biomedical Microdevices and is an active participant in both national and international research conferences.