Catherine Klapperich
Founding Director
Dr. Catherine Klapperich is Professor and Vice Chair of Biomedical Engineering.
She was the Dorf-Ebner Distinguished Faculty Fellow in 2014-2019. She holds appointments in the Division of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She is the Director of the Laboratory for Diagnostics and Global Healthcare Technologies and a member of the Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. In 2014, Dr. Klapperich was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. She is also a guest faculty member in the Global Health Delivery Project at Harvard University.
Before coming to Boston, Dr. Klapperich was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in the lab of Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi, and was a Senior Research Scientist at Aclara Biosciences in Mountain View, CA. She earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in 2000 from the University of California, Berkeley; her M.S. in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University and her B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Northwestern University.
Dr. Klapperich’s research is focused on engineering medical devices for use in low resource settings and at the point of care. Current projects are focused on disposable microfluidic diagnostics that incorporate on-board sample preparation and on minimally instrumented devices to enable molecular testing. Her work includes diagnostics for CT-NG, HPV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Recently, Dr. Klapperich and colleagues founded a startup company, Jane Diagnostics, Inc., to commercialize these technologies.