ChemBE’s Zachary Gagnon to Receive NASA’s Early Career Faculty Award

Zachary Gagnon, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has been selected to receive NASA’s Early Career Faculty Award.

These awards recognize outstanding early-career faculty researchers, and challenge them to examine the theoretical feasibility of ideas and approaches critical to making space travel, exploration, and science more effective, affordable, and sustainable.

Zachary Gagnon

Gagnon’s project — “Rapid and Simple Sample Acquisition During Space Flight: Simultaneous Extraction of Proteins and Nucleic Acids from Bodily Fluids and Cabin Water Using FreeFlow Bi-directional Isotachophoresis”—aims to dramatically improve the hardware used to monitor the health of humans on long space flight missions.

In general, his research focuses on new ways of utilizing electrokinetic and microfluidic phenomena for biological and biomedical applications. In particular, Gagnon is interested in how electric fields interact with fluid interfaces to induce precise injection and selective mass transport, with the goal being to apply electro-fluidic phenomena to protein purification, cell migration and rare cell isolation applications.