Science on Tap to discuss the potential for disease detection using smartphones

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Tamara Kinzer-Ursem, a Purdue University assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, will speak at the next installment of Science on Tap, which will focus on challenges and opportunities in point-of-care disease detection.

The talk, titled “Will Your Smartphone Replace Your Doctor?” will take place at 6 p.m. Thursday (Feb. 28) at Lafayette Brewing Company, 622 Main St., Lafayette. The talk is free and open to anyone 21 and older.

Kinzer-Ursem will address the need to develop low-cost devices for infectious disease detection that are rapid, sensitive and accurate. Current gold standard screenings are often laboratory-based and expensive, or are cheap but not trusted. However, an alternative method allows for highly sensitive detection of a pathogen at the point of need. In this talk, Kinzer-Ursem will introduce the fundamentals of this technology, compare it with current gold-standard measurements, and discuss work in translating technology from the lab to a portable smartphone-based detection platform. She will also discuss some of the challenges in market adoption and distribution that accompany commercialization of such devices.

Kinzer-Ursem earned her bachelor’s degree in bioengineering from the University of Toledo and master’s and doctoral degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan. She did postdoctoral work in biology at California Institute of Technology focused on molecular neuroscience.

Science on Tap, led by graduate students Elizabeth Phillips, Matthew Pharris, Emma Lendy and Aswathy Chandran, provides Purdue faculty and collaborating researchers the opportunity to share research activities in an informal setting with presentations designed to appeal to a general audience.  

Writer: Kelsey Schnieders Lefever, kschnied@purdue.edu 

Source: Emma Lendy, elendy@purdue.edu