Dr. Yu-Hwa Lo, Ph.D.
Professor
Email: ylo@ucsd.edu
Yu-Hwa Lo is professor at Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California at San Diego (UCSD), USA. Professor Yu-Hwa Lo received his Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 1987. He worked at Bellcore as a technical staff member from 1988-1990, and became an assistant and then associate professor of Cornell University from 1991 to 1999. He became a professor of UCSD in 1999 and has been the director of the Nano3 Facility (Nanoscience, Nanoengineering, and Nanomedicine) since 2005. Currently his research interests are in microfluidics and optofluidics, lab-on-a-chip devices for biomedicine, bio-imaging, nanophotonics, and semiconductor single-photon detectors. He has published over 400 papers, 10 book chapters and been awarded 30 patents. His inventions have been licensed to and commercialized by semiconductor, optoelectronic, and biotech industries, yielding over $4B product revenues and leading to several startup companies. He has served a number of panels for US government and been a member of the scientific advisory board of several biotech companies. He has received NASA Innovation Award, the Commercialization of Advanced Technology Award, and a couple of best paper awards and teaching awards. He is a fellow of the Optical Society of America and the IEEE.
With an aging population, the cost of health care has increased substantially over the years. Today nearly 3 trillion dollars are spent in the United States each year, and it is imperative that we keep the climbing health care expense under control while raising the quality and efficiency of the health care. Point of care is a promising path to meet such goals because it promises timely, personal, and cost effective diagnosis and treatments with improved patient outcomes. However, most of today’s point-of-care devices have traded quality and performance for cost and speed. As a result, the clinical utility of today’s point-of-care devices has been seriously limited. In this presentation, we will discuss the challenges and potential solutions for new generation biomedical devices for point-of-care applications. These devices will be built upon a lab-on-a-chip platform that integrates many technologies including microfluidics, photonics, nanotechnologies, and electronics. They will also leverage from the prevailing mobile devices for enhanced portability, connectivity, and usability. A few examples of such point-of-care devices for disease diagnosis and health monitoring will be discussed.