Holger Schmidt (photo by C. Lagattuta)
Tim Stephens | UCSC | December 03, 2019
Holger Schmidt, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Santa Cruz, has been named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).
The NAI Fellows Program highlights academic inventors who have demonstrated a spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society. Election to NAI Fellow is the highest professional distinction accorded solely to academic inventors.
Schmidt’s inventions include novel optical sensing technologies with applications in biomedical diagnostics. He and his collaborators developed hollow-core optical waveguides that can be integrated into chips using standard silicon fabrication technology, enabling light propagation through tiny volumes of liquids on a chip. Diagnostic instruments based on these “optofluidic chips” offer the potential for a rapid, low-cost, and portable option for identifying molecular biomarkers and other disease-related bioparticles such as whole viruses.