Shubhodeep Paul work as a Bio-MEMs Engineer Offers Innovative Ways For Scientists To Conduct Their Research
Growing up in a household of engineers in an industrial town sparked Shubhodeep Paul’s interest in science and engineering at an early age. He watched people around him use their skill sets to solve problems and knew he wanted to do something similar. In college, Shubhodeep decided to study mechanical engineering at West Bengal University of Technology in Kolkata, India. His undergraduate degree exposed him to the world of fluid and thermal sciences, and immediately, Shubhodeep was drawn toward the field.
After graduation, he focused on gathering hands-on exposure to fluid mechanics and process engineering in the water industry space in India. While working, it became clear that this industry was trying to solve today’s problems with technology made decades ago. Shubhodeep wasn’t interested in getting stuck in the same patterns the industry had been operating in; he realized it was time for real change. He grabbed the opportunity and delved into the innovation happening in fluid sciences. He believes innovation and further research in this field will one day make an impact and lead to a modernized industry.
Ready to push the boundaries and start working outside the box, Shubhodeep went to the University of Texas at Arlington to obtain a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering. His studies focused on microfluidics, MEMs, and separation science. Throughout the entirety of the Ph.D. program, Shubhodeep worked as a graduate teaching assistant and a graduate research assistant, conducting some of his first research projects and paving the way for his future and the future of microfluidics.
He noticed that integrating separation science on microfluidic platforms had many applications, one of which was in the biotechnology space. To understand the field and the potential ways that his research could impact it, Shubhodeep worked closely with scientists, shadowing their work and learning about the obstacles in biomedical research. Ultimately, some of his most critical learnings and biggest inspirations came from someone incredibly close to him: his wife.
She was a Ph.D. student and would spend hours in her lab preparing samples and running complex protocols to conduct her molecular biology experiments. Labor-intensive, manual work to push science experiments was her daily reality, and one such phase of these experiments that took time and resources was DNA sample preparation. Shubhodeep invented a platform that could automate DNA extraction and sample preparation techniques to optimize this specific process cost-effectively. Called the EWOD (electrowetting-on-dielectric) platform, Shubhodeep’s creation enabled drop-to-drop extraction, paving the way for a faster and revolutionized approach for upstream operations in molecular biology.
Building on the advancements brought forward by EWOD Digital Microfluidics, Shubhodeep set out on a mission to miniaturize the separation and purification processes involved during sample pretreatment steps. Because micro total analysis systems (microTAS) were rising in popularity, scientists needed to integrate innovative separation and purification methods with this system. Ultimately, Shubhodeep, through his work, addressed this problem and developed microchips that could manipulate microdroplets and conduct precise liquid-liquid drop-to-drop microextraction. Shubhodeep’s solution was used to transfer and extract target biomolecules from the micro drop of the sample to the micro drop of the extractant, purifying it along the way in an automated fashion. When it was developed, no other platform could conduct such a maneuver and extraction method on that small of a scale, and as a result, the invention gained much attention from scientists worldwide.
Shubhodeep’s paper on this project was a finalist for the “Best Paper Award'' at the IEEE NEMS Conference in 2017 and one of the top five papers in the Biomicrofluidics Journal for the 2021 edition. Since then, it has been cited by researchers worldwide in other research projects. He presented the outcome of this endeavor at four different conferences, including the IEEE NEMS in 2017, The Bluebonnet Symposium on Thermal-Fluid Sciences in 2018, the iC3 Life Science Summit in 2018, and MicroTAS in 2019.
A lot has happened in Shubhodeep’s professional life since the success of his first innovation, and much of it is thanks to the outcome of this project. It served as the catalyst for future projects and helped him achieve his dreams of playing a vital role in an innovative industry setting. He currently works as a Bio-MEMs Engineer at a Biotech startup. Like his first undertaking, Shubhodeep now gets to work with some of the industry’s best scientists, making their jobs easier, enabling research to happen faster, and having an impact on human health. Shubhodeep knew early on that he was meant to innovate, but the level of impact and the speed at which he’d have it could never have been predicted.
