Rashid Bashir is the Abel Bliss Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering & Bioengineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he serves as Director of the Micro and NanoTechnology Laboratory. He is a pioneer in bioMEMS technologies, point-of-care sensors, and nanotechnology for biomedical applications. His interests include interfacing biology and engineering from molecular to tissue scale, and applications of semiconductor fabrication to biomedical engineering, all applied to solve biomedical problems. He is a co-inventor of the electrical detection system that underlies Daktari’s CD4 counting technology, and has authored or co-authored more than 100 journal papers, 120 conference papers and abstracts, and has been granted 33 patents. He is a fellow of IEEE and AIMBE.

Xuanhong Cheng has been the P. C. Rossin Assistant Professor of Bioengineering & Materials Science and Engineering at Lehigh University since 2008. She holds a PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Washington and is a co-inventor of the CD4 microchip. Her general research interest is in the development of microfluidic platforms for biological sample processing and bio-particle detection, especially the creation of appropriate technologies for point of care diagnosis.

Mehmet Toner is the Helen Andrus Benedict Professor of Surgery (Bioengineering) at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He is known as a pioneer in the development of clinical microfluidic tools and microelectromechanical systems with a broad range of applications in medicine and global health. He is the co-inventor of the CD4 microchip and co-founder of several biotechnology companies. He is the author of more than 250 original scientific and technical publications, is the inventor of more than 30 patents, and holds a PhD degree from MIT.