Joel Voldman is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1995.  He received the M.S and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, in 1997 and 2001, developing bioMEMS for single-cell analysis.  Following this, he was a postdoctoral associate in George Church’s lab at Harvard Medical School, where he studied developmental biology.  In 2002 he returned to MIT as an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at MIT. In 2004 he was awarded the NBX Career Development Chair, in 2006 promoted to Associate Professor, and in 2013 promoted to Professor in the department.  In 2018 he became Associate Head of the Department. Among several awards, he has received an NSF CAREER award, an ACS Young Innovator Award, a Bose Fellow award, Jamieson Teaching Award, Smullin Teaching Award, Quick Faculty Research Innovation Fellowship, and awards for posters and presentations at international conferences.  

 

Prof. Voldman’s research focuses on developing microfluidic technology for biology and medicine, with an emphasis on cell sorting and stem cell biology.  He has developed a host of technologies to arrange, culture, and sort diverse cell types including immune cells, endothelial cells, and stem cells. Currentareas of research include recapitulating the induction of atherosclerosis on a microfluidic chip, and using microfluidic tools to study how immune cells decide to attack tumor cells. He is also interested in translational medical work, such as developing point-of-care drop-of-blood assays for proteins and rapid microfluidic tests for immune cell activation for the treatment of sepsis.

 

 

Microsystems have the potential to impact biology by providing new ways to manipulate cells and the microenvironment around them.  Simply physically manipulating cells or their environment—using microfluidics, electric fields, or optical forces—provides new ways to separate cells and organize cell-cell interactions.  Immune cells are of particular interest because of their central role in defending the body against foreign invaders.  As a consequence, many microfluidic devices have been used to study both the basic biology of immune cells as well as to assay them for clinical use. Our lab has developed technologies on both ends of the spectrum, from cell pairing devices able to study information flow in immune cells, to electrical sorting devices for assaying immune cell function in response to disease. In terms of cell pairing, we have developed two complementary approaches to creating programmed pairs of cells, one using capture “cups” and a three-step back-and-forth loading procedure to pair thousands of cells in parallel, and the other using microfluidic “corrals” to contain cells. With these devices we can pair immune cells with each other or with other cells (i.e., tumor cells) to study information flow from first contact to downstream effector functions, elucidating how decision-making occurs in these interactions. Microfluidics can be used to manipulate the environment around cells.  For example, we have developed arrays of microfluidic perfusion culture chambers that use fluid flow to create a convection-dominated transport environment, allowing control over local cell-cell diffusible signaling.  This in turn provides a more controlled soluble microenvironment in which to study diffusible signaling in cell systems.  In particular, we have examined the impact of diffusible signaling on self-renewal and neural specification of embryonic stem cells.  Using these microsystems, we have identified the existence of previously unknown autocrine loops involved in fate specification, and have delineated the effects of shear itself on self-renewal.  Together, these new microscale tools provide ways to exploit cells’ potential for both basic science and applied biotechnology.