Catherine Klapperich
Associate Chair for Graduate Studies, Biomedical Engineering; Associate Professor, Biomedical Engineering; Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering
Dr. Catherine Klapperich is a Kern Innovation Faculty Fellow and an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. She also 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 theCenter for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. In 2012, she became the director of the newly formed NIH Center for Future Technologies in Cancer Care (FTCC) at BU.
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 with Drs. Lisa Pruitt and Kyriakos Komvopoulos; 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 diagnostics. Her work includes diagnostics for infectious diarrhea, respiratory infections, HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. These devices have been tested in Nicaragua and Kenya. Other work in the lab is focused on the design and deployment of devices to enable systems biology approaches to studying complex diseases including TB.
Dr. Klapperich’s lab is funded by grants from the NIH, DOD, CIMIT and the Coulter Foundation. In 2010, she was an invited participant in the National Academies of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering conference held in Agra, India. She serves on the editorial board of Biomedical Microdevices and is an active participant in both national and international research conferences.