Rustem Ismagilov

2010 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise Honoree in Biomedical Science

Location

Pasadena, CA

Title

Director, Jacobs Institute for Molecular Engineering for Medicine, CalTech; Ethel Wilson Bowles and Robert Bowles Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, CalTech

Area(s) of Research

Microfluidics

Education

University of Chicago, Department of Chemistry (independent research); Harvard University, (postdoc); University of Wisconsin−Madison, (PhD, physical organic chemistry); Higher Chemical College, Russian Academy of Sciences

Country of Birth

Russia

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Rustem Ismagilov’s research province is microfluidics, the flow of fluids through submillimeter channels, thinner than a human hair. His specialty in this multidisciplinary field, which emerged in the ‘80s, is to understand and control complex chemical and biological systems at critical times and locations.

Now a professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics at the University of Chicago, Ismagilov has demonstrated how microfluidics can be used to simulate blood clotting, a system with potential medical applications and that can help researchers better understand and control other biochemical reaction networks, such as the development of an organism from a single cell.

Ismagilov is using microfluidics to understand how spatial structure affects interactions of microbes and microbial communities of the human microbiome and the environment. He is developing a “chemistrode,” a tool similar to an electrode as it delivers local stimuli and records biological response with high time resolution, but does it at the chemical rather than electrical level. He is also expanding his effort in point of care diagnostics to impact global health.

Rustem Ismagilov was born in Ufa, Russia. He graduated from the Higher Chemical College of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, in 1994, before immigrating to the United States to complete his PhD in physical organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1998. He conducted his postdoctoral work at Harvard University, and began his independent research career in 2001, as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, Department of Chemistry.