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STUDENT PROFILES

Adam Siegel

Area

Engineering Sciences, Bioengineering (with HST)

Focus

In his free time, Adam spends winters on the snow—he’s an assistant coach for a local ski team—and summers playing volleyball on the beach.  “Graduate school can be pretty stressful at times.  It’s important to have activities that inspire you outside of the lab.”

Education

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, B.S. in Electrical Engineering

One of the aspects of Harvard’s School of Engineering that really struck me as unique was how the school, as a whole, is so welcoming.  People are friendly, the professors have time to talk with you, and you are treated as a colleague, not just another lab worker.  I also interviewed several current students prior to entering the program.  All of them were excited about their research projects and felt that they had made the right choice.

I work in George Whitesides’ group in the Department of Chemistry.  One of the strengths of the group is its focus on integrating knowledge across many disciplines to invent new technologies.  One of my current projects, called the Portable and Cost-Effective Immunoassay or "POCKET", combines the fields of electrical engineering, microfluidics, immunology and public health.  The microfluidic device uses a chemical technique called silver-reduction to detect the presence of HIV or tuberculosis antigen in a patient's blood serum.  It runs on a 9V battery and has been shown to diagnose disease with precision approaching that of bench-top methods for a fraction of the cost (the device itself costs under $50 to produce, and each test is <$1 to perform).  The product is now a core technology for Claros Diagnostics, a Harvard start-up enterprise, whose ultimate goal is to aid in the diagnosis of disease in developing countries and other resource-poor settings. 

I guess what excites me the most about my research here is that the end goal isn’t just to publish results in some esoteric journal, but rather, to develop technologies that may solve real problems in the world (or at the very least, seed start-up companies)!