BME Lecture Series: Piotr Garstecki, Polish Academy of Sciences

Monday, September 10, 2018 - 3:00 p.m. to Tuesday, September 11, 2018 - 2:55 p.m.
3201 Natural Sciences 2
Piotr Garstecki, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Abstract: Antimicrobial resistance threatens to become the number one cause of death and the grimmest problem in health worldwide. Apart from coming up with new antibiotics we need to use antibiotics wiser, both the existing and the new ones. We need better diagnostics to avoid the spread of infections, to target the infecting pathogens with effective treatment, and to understand the response of bacterial cells and populations to antibiotics. Microfluidics offers a route to important improvements in medical diagnostics and in research. I will describe methods for ultra-fast detection of infections, for comprehensive phenotypic susceptibility screening, and for looking at the factors that determine proliferation in the presence of antibiotic, at the single cell level.

Bio: Piotr Garstecki is a professor at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Science (PSA) in Warsaw, Poland. He obtained a master's degree in theoretical physics from the College of Science, PSA, in 1998 and a doctorate in chemistry from the Institute of Physical Chemistry, also from the PSA. Later he was a postdoctoral fellow in the group of George Whitesides in the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department at Harvard University. He currently leads the Research Group of Microfluidics and Complex Fluids in the Department of Soft Condensed Matter at PSA. The group conducts research on fundamental aspects of the physics of soft matter systems and of microscale flow, and develops microfluidic tools for chemistry and biology. For more information, see http://pepe.ichf.edu.pl/pgarstecki/. Garstecki also is an entrepreneur, co-founding a healthcare start-up, Scope Fluidics S.A. in 2010: http://scopefluidics.com/