Research Interests

The increase in money and effort directed at health care and medical research in the US is outpacing virtually every other field--a consequence of changing priorities and an aging population. My interests lie in developing technologies for medical diagnosis and research. In particular, I am interested in new microfluidic technologies which reduce the costs, and increase the throughput and sensitivity, of biomedical tools.

Microfluidics is, broadly, the practice of building fluidic devices with extremely small dimensions. Often, these devices are scaled-down versions of larger equipment. Because the change in dimensions is so vast--often, volumes are reduced more than a million-fold--the cost and performance of the device can be improved, and phenomena not accessible at the macro scale can be exploited. One ultimate goal of microfluidics is combine a variety of useful technologies on a single microfluidic chip--a so-called "lab on a chip".

Currently (mid 2007) I am exploring a phenomenon called isotachophoresis (ITP) which can quickly separate and concentrate (our lab has achieved 1,000,000-fold!) chemicals in a microchannel. We are seeking new methods of monitoring the ITP process, and are developing new protocols which improve the versatility and sensitivity of ITP.

Bio

I was born in State College, PA, took a brief detour to North Carolina and then spent my… "formative years" in Rochester, New York. After elementary school in Owings Mills, Maryland, I moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The "Christmas City". My middle school, East Hills, had a great, life-changing wilderness education program called "Monagacci" that I was lucky enough to be a part of.

Next, "Freedom High School". Our rival high school was "Liberty High School", a few miles down the road. Proving that one cannot judge a book by its cover (or title), they both implemented mandatory community service. It was a great high school in many ways, with a horrible math program. Ah, here's where I think the story gets interesting. While looking at colleges, I was mailed a brochure from Harvey Mudd College. It was different from any brochure I'd received. Instead of staged photos of classes held in a grassy quad, it had a full-page description of the college's computing resources. Very representative of the HMC ethos. I loved HMC, and while I'm glad to be out of its creepy one-city-block campus, I'm not sure that any college in the US offers a better technical undergrad education. During my time at Mudd I spent a semester abroad at the University of Western Australia. Australia is awesome. I hope to go back some day. So, after a summer working at a Boston, MA startup called Living Microsystems, and a few awesome weeks traveling China with Prof. Bassman and my friend Tavi, both from HMC, I started graduate school in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford. If everything goes according to plan, I'll be here until… oh… 2011. After that, who knows.

Contact Me

Feel free to contact me for any reason. My email is .

Mobile: (610) 984-4299

Mailing Address:
Rob Chambers
750 N Shoreline Blvd #134
Mountain View, CA 94043