The Department of Biomedical Engineering’s Professor Sergey Shevkoplyas was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) this spring. This recognition is one of the most prestigious honors in the field, and underscores the department’s emergence as a nationally competitive research powerhouse and a hub for translational biomedical innovation.
“It is a great honor to be inducted as an AIMBE Fellow, especially to have been nominated by Dr. Schultz, a founding Fellow and past President of AIMBE, and during the organization’s 35th anniversary year,” said Shevkoplyas, who was elected for “outstanding contributions to microfluidics for studying blood flow in capillary networks, low-cost point-of-care diagnostics and high-throughput cell separation.”
This highly selective professional distinction honors individuals who have made outstanding contributions to engineering and medicine research, practice or education. Fellows are nominated, reviewed and elected by their peers through a rigorous process. The College includes leaders from academia, industry, government and clinical practice, and counts among its members Nobel Prize laureates, Presidential Medal of Science and/or Technology awardees, and hundreds of members of the National Academies of Engineering, Medicine, and Sciences.
Shevkoplyas’s research sits at the intersection of device design and humanitarian impact, with a focus on making life-saving care accessible to pediatric and vulnerable patients worldwide. He developed one of the earliest low-cost, paper-based point-of-care diagnostic tests for sickle-cell disease and pioneered high-throughput blood cell separation technologies with broad clinical applications including pediatric leukapheresis and cellular therapy manufacturing. His translational track record includes more than 80 peer-reviewed publications, 11 issued U.S. patents and over $10 million in competitive funding.
“This recognition means a great deal to me because it reflects the collective effort of so many talented students and collaborators who have worked alongside me to develop technologies that can make a real difference for patients who need them most,” said Shevkoplyas. “I hope this honor inspires the next generation of engineers to pursue research with both scientific rigor and humanitarian purpose.”
Shevkoplyas is the fourth core BME faculty member to be elected an AIMBE Fellow, following Professor Emeritus Jerome Schultz, John S. Dunn Endowed Chair Professor and Founding Chair of UH BME Department Metin Akay and Cullen Endowed Chair and current Department Chair Kirill Larin.
The recognition of BME faculty by their peers through prestigious AIMBE fellowship reflects a culture of rigorous scholarship, meaningful translation and sustained impact that result in growing prominence and international recognition in microfluidics and organ-on-chip technologies, neural engineering and rehabilitation, biophotonics and ocular gene therapy, biomaterials and tissue engineering, AI-driven diagnostics and clinical decision making and beyond.