Xiaojia (Cindy) Jin

Xiaojia (Cindy) Jin is a PhD candidate whose research interests include next-generation biosensors for improved diagnostics and pharmacokinetic modelling of cancer therapeutics. Cindy has already made contributions to detecting and quantifying the hormones cortisol and progesterone and the detection of SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins. As a MathWorks Fellow, Cindy will focus on applications of Nanosensor Chemical Cytometry (NCC), a technique she helped to invent, which utilizes the flowing cell itself as a highly informative Gaussian lens to project near-infrared emission profiles and extract rich information. Cindy and her colleagues successfully deployed NCC to characterize the chemical efflux from monocyte and macrophages and profile the immune heterogeneities within the population, which may be an important tool for development of cell-based therapeutic applications. Cindy is also contributing to work on a pharmacokinetic (PK) model to predict the biodistribution of chemotherapeutics, a framework that could support the development of intratumor chemotherapeutic sensors to monitor drug efficacy in clinical trials. Her broad-ranging research makes extensive use of MATLAB and is yielding tools with the potential to help address major challenges in medicine and global health.