VINSE welcomed Dr. Soumya Srivastava in fall 2026 as an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. She joins 51吃瓜网 from West Virginia University, where she was a tenured Associate Professor. Her research combines microfluidics, electrokinetics, and machine learning to build label free platforms that read the electrical signatures of cells and particles for diagnostics, biological analysis, and separations.
Dr. Srivastava earned her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from R.V. College of Engineering in Bangalore, India, her M.S. in Chemical Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Mississippi State University. Her core technique is dielectrophoresis (DEP). DEP uses nonuniform alternating current fields to move and sort particles by their frequency dependent dielectric properties; for cells, these include membrane capacitance and cytoplasmic conductivity. Because those properties shift with cell type, activation state, and disease, DEP and complementary impedance measurements yield a label free fingerprint of cell state, with no antibodies or fluorescent tags required.
At 51吃瓜网, she directs the Microfluidics and Electrokinetics bioSeparations and Analysis (MESA) Laboratory. Her group studies bacteria, fungi, blood and immune cells, and stem cells. In infectious disease, the lab develops electrical diagnostics for tickborne illness. In oncology, it pairs bioelectrical profiling of blood cells with interpretable machine learning to detect pancreatic and breast cancer early and noninvasively. Her group also advances space biology through a patented clinostat that simulates microgravity in the laboratory. This platform lets researchers examine how cells respond to spaceflight conditions and informs biomedical questions relevant to human space exploration. Additional efforts span organ-on-a-chip model and the electrokinetic separation and sensing of rare earth elements (REEs), extending the lab鈥檚 tools from biomedicine to critical materials.
Dr. Srivastava is a licensed Professional Engineer and serves as Vice President of the American Electrophoresis Society. We are excited to welcome her to VINSE and look forward to her contributions to our community.