Contact

Cheryl Ebner
Science & Engineering Council of Santa Barbara
805-698-1121
scieng@silcom.com

Smartphone, M.D.: Smartphone and Spit Test for COVID and Flu

SEC's April Presentation: Our speaker will discuss a smartphone-based COVID and influenza diagnostic test that is among the most rapid, sensitive, affordable, and scalable tests known. It can be readily adapted for other pathogens with pandemic potential including novel COVID variants and influenza, and it provides a platform for inexpensive home-based testing. His lab has provided the app and technology on an open source basis, which is freely available to all to help reduce the world’s inequities.

Our Speaker: Dr. Michael Mahan, Professor at UCSB's Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, received his Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Utah. He was an NIH post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School where he began his work on the molecular mechanisms underlying salmonella pathogenesis. Dr. Mahan joined the UCSB faculty in 1993 and was a co-founder and director of Remedyne Corporation, a biotech company in Santa Barbara.

To RSVP: Simply press the "Register Now!" button below. You'll receive a Zoom invitation by email when you register, and a reminder prior to the event.

(The SEC has instituted a small non-member registration fee for online meetings.)

Answers to some of the most pressing biological questions – such as how cancer cells metastasize, neurons degenerate, and immune cells locate their targets – are buried deep inside the body, beyond the reach of conventional light-based imaging probes. Our group approaches this challenge by pursuing the development of tissue-penetrant magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) agents to noninvasively image biological targets at any arbitrary depth inside living, breathing animals. In this talk, I will highlight our latest efforts in developing such imaging tools by engineering biomolecules with unusual functions: for example modulating water movement in and out of cells, converting antimicrobial immunity proteins into calcium biosensors, and co-opting radioprotective peptides for in vivo bacterial imaging.

Our Sponsors: This meeting is sponsored in part by Charter Sponsor Community West Bank, Bengal Engineering, Toyon Research Corporation; and Premier Sponsor Minot Enterprises .

From our Co-Presidents Tim Murphy and Gary Kravetz:

See our YouTube channel that contains our growing archive of recent presentations!
Our Zoom meetings continue on second Wednesdays - watch this space for a return to iin-person meetings!
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Do you have an idea for a future meeting? Please contact program chair Yvonne DeGraw.

Plan now for upcoming SEC meetings:

April 13: Dr. Michael Mahan, "Smartphone, M.D: Smartphone and Spit Test for COVID and Flu"

May 11: Dr. Kenneth Kosik, "The Surprising Science of Brain Organoids"

June 8: Dr. Rachel Street, "Hunting Isolated Black Holes with Microlensing"

July 13: Dr. Galan Moody, "Quantum Computing"

August 10: Dr. Chris Richardson, "Using Gene Editing Tools to Understand DNA Repair"