Michelle Khine Named to Marie Claire Magazine’s Women on Top Awards

Khine is one of 16 women selected

Associate Professor Michelle Khine, Ph.D., Department of Biomedical Engineering, has been named as “Top Scientist” in the 2011 Women on Top Awards by Marie Claire Magazinein the November 2011 issue.

Khine is best known for the method she devised to fabricate tiny features onto plastic chips. She discovered this by using material from one of her favorite childhood toys, Shrinky Dinks.  She printed microfluidic patterns onto the Shrinky Dink sheets using a laser-jet printer, then heated them in a toaster oven. As the pieces flattened out into hard plastic shapes, the printed ink lines also shrank, creating patterns of channels and microwells that are perfect for the mixing of fluids and moving of cells needed to perform her experiments without the need for a clean room and millions of dollars in sensitive and expensive equipment.



Khine is the scientific founder of Shrink Nanotechnologies, Inc. and also co-founded Fluxion Biosciences, Inc. while she was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. Prior to arriving at The Henry Samueli School of Engineering in 2009, she was an assistant and founding professor at UC Merced (2006-09). Khine received her B.S. and M.S. from UC Berkeley in mechanical engineering (1999 and 2001, respectively) and her Ph.D., under the Arnold and Barbara Silverman Distinguished Professor Luke P. Lee, in bioengineering (2005) from UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco. In 2009, Khine was named one of Forbes “Revolutionaries” and one of Technology Review’s “35 Innovators Under 35 (TR35).” In 2011, Fast Company Magazine named her as one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business,” she was awarded the National Institutes of Health (NIH) New Innovator's Award, and most recently, she was named a finalist for the prestigious World Technology Award for Materials and named a World Technology Network Fellow.



The Women on Top Awards began in 2010 as a way for Marie Claire to highlight young career women in the work force and to show young women the variety of industries that women have been able to revolutionize.



Khine’s complete profile in Marie Claire can be viewed here along with the rest of the 2011 Women on Top Award winners.