Title: “Engineering Point of Care Diagnostics for Low Resource Settings: Understanding the Problem and Developing the Appropriate Technology”
Date: November 24, 2015
Time: 10:45 – 11:35 AM
Place: WEB L104
Abstract
There is a real need for advanced sensing technology to address significant health disparities in resource limited environments. Diseases such as Tuberculosis, effect over 9 million people a year world-wide, with another estimated 3 million being missed because of the lack of low cost tools to help manage the disease and reach patients in rural settings. In order to address this problem a good understanding of the medical, and socio-economic ecosystems present in a particular community are important. This talk will discuss the development of a point of care tuberculosis screening technology based on breath, and how the design, deployment and application is being driven by the end-user (physicians and healthcare professionals)
Short Biography
Professor Swomitra Mohanty is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering. He received his BS from the University of Chicago, MS from Georgia Institute of Technology, and PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Following this he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California-Berkeley. He joined the University of Utah as a Research Professor in 2011 and then as an Assistant Professor in 2015. He has spent the last 10 years in developing nanomaterials, and microdevices for applications in biosensing, chemical sensing, environmental mitigation, and energy harvesting. His current research focus on developing point of care diagnostic devices for Tuberculosis, photo-electrocatalytic removal water contaminants, and point of use sensors for space exploration.