Govind Kaigala           

Govind Kaigala is currently a Research Staff Member in the Science & Technology department of IBM Research Europe in Zurich. His research is aligned within the Precision Diagnostics project aimed at developing enabling technologies for healthcare and life sciences (HCLS) area while generating high-value data.

He is passionate about personalized medicine, quantitative biology and translational clinical/medical research.

Current activities

He is motivated to develop new microscale technologies that could help in the HCLS area both in research and diagnostics.

On the technological front, he along with the team proposed new concepts such as (a) open space microfluidics, and, (b) reconfigurable microfluidics, which are now gaining increasing acceptance in the community. Implementations of these concepts is being done in several ways using compartmentalization, hydrodynamics and electrokinetics.

In recent years, there is a strong motivation to work on applications with much of the current focus on developing new integrative methods for precise tumor analysis wherein liquid localization, microscale molecular assays along with data integration are leading to new clinically-applicable workflows that will very likely have implications in diagnosis, prognosis and prediction. A particular focus has been to quantify tumor heterogeneity.

For further details, see link: Open space microfluidics

Keywords:

microfluidics,  lab-on-a-chip,  scanning probes,  biointerfaces,  molecular diagnostics , tumor profiling, personalized medicine

Selected metrics

• Authored and co-authored 66 peer-reviewed journal publications, 1 book, 4 book chapters, 90 conference proceedings and abstracts and 44 families of patents.
• IBM awards, including Research Division Accomplishment Awards (2020, 2017 & 2014) and named "Master Inventor" in 2019.
• Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2020.
• Horizon Alumni Award from the University of Alberta, Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada's (NSERC) PGS & PDF. He is a J.N. Tata Endowment Fellow and a Senior Member of IEEE.
• Funding from: IBM and other industrial engagements, Govind’s work is supported by the European Research Council (ERC), the European Union, and SystemsX.ch Swiss National Science Foundation.

Prior to joining IBM

Govind Kaigala was a postdoctoral fellow at the Microfluidics Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, and at the Stanford Medical School, USA. He received both his Ph.D. and M.Eng. degrees from the University of Alberta, Canada, for work done in the Depts. of Electrical Engineering and Experimental Oncology (Cross Cancer Institute). Prior to his doctoral studies, he was a hardware design engineer working on the design of fault-tolerant optical communication networks.

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