Ulri Lee

Ulri Lee is a Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow whose research integrates microfluidics and analytical chemistry to build new bioanalytical microfluidic tools to understand the environment and human health. As a doctoral candidate, Ulri developed a novel open-microfluidic patterning method that utilizes surface tension forces to form biological cell-laden hydrogel layers; the resulting multi-gel and multi-cell 3D structures have a wide range of potential applications in tissue engineering and organ-on-chips technologies and could be beneficial to researchers in biology, fluidics, and engineering labs that seek prototyping solutions. As a postdoctoral fellow, Ulri is pursuing new innovations in open microfluidics, focusing on a blood-brain barrier (BBB) to study neuropsychiatric diseases. Her goal is to engineer a novel platform that is streamlined and user-friendly and will enable researchers to perform many organs-on-chip in parallel. This technology could enable researchers to study the BBB with no need for engineering experience, leading to wider dissemination of this technology. Ulri’s path-breaking work is expanding fundamental knowledge in open-droplet microfluidics and has the potential to support innovations in many domains, including environmental science and medicine.