Paul Yager, PhD

Paul Yager, PhD, is the CSO of UbiDX and a professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Washington, with adjunct appointments in Chemistry, Global Health, and Oral Biology.  A native of Manhattan, he received his A.B. in Biochemistry from Princeton in 1975, and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Oregon in 1980, specializing in vibrational spectroscopy of biomolecules.  After an NRC Fellowship at the Naval Research Laboratory (1980-1982), he joined the NRL staff as a Research Chemist.  He moved to the Center (now Department) of Bioengineering at the University of Washington as Associate Professor in 1987, advancing to Professor in 1995; he served as Chair of the department from 2007 to 2013.  Initially working on self-organizing lipid microstructure and optically-based biomedical sensors, since 1992 his lab has focused primarily on development of microfluidics for the analysis of biological fluids for use in low-cost point-of-care biomedical diagnostics for the developed and developing worlds.  From 2005-2010 a team led by Yager was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a low-cost rugged point-of-care system for pathogen identification.  Since 2008, most lab activity has focused on developing two-dimensional porous networks (paper microfluidics) for ultra-low-cost instrument-free point-of-care pathogen identification for human diagnosis.  Readout is often coupled optical imaging for quantitative analysis and data transmission; this has been under support of NIH, NSF, DARPA, DTRA, WRF and the Emergent Ventures fund.  He has authored 160 research publications in refereed journals, has 42 issued patents, and has co-founded 2 companies: Micronics and UbiDX.