N. Gözde Durmuş, Ph.D

Stanford University
Genome Technology Center

Gozde Durmus is a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University; working with Prof. Ronald W. Davis and Prof. Lars Steinmetz at the Stanford Genome Technology Center. She received her Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering from Brown University in May 2013, with a minor in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship. She is also an alumna of the Ignite Program at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. She was a Fulbright Scholar at Boston University and received her M.Eng. degree in Biomedical Engineering as a College of Engineering Fellow in 2009. She received her B.S. degree in Molecular Biology and Genetics from Middle East Technical University (METU) in 2007. In 2015, she has been recognized among the “Top 35 Innovators Under 35” (TR35), as a pioneer in biotechnology and medicine, by MIT Technology Review.

Dr. Durmus develops and applies translational micro/nanotechnologies to study cellular heterogeneity and complex biological systems for single cell analysis and precision medicine. Her research philosophy is to apply these platforms to fundamentally understand and address the mechanisms of disease, with a specific emphasis on cancer. She has demonstrated magnetic levitation of living cells and applied this unique tool to perform ultra-precise density measurements, magnetic sorting and profiling of thousands of cells in seconds at single-cell resolution, which was not possible before with a bench top analogue. Her research in this field has led her to become deeply involved in cancer biology, single-cell sequencing and the development of new clinical diagnostics for precision medicine. These technologies are used for wide range of applications in medicine, such as, label-free detection of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from blood; high-throughput drug screening; and rapid detection and monitoring of antibiotic resistance in real-time. During her PhD, she has engineered nanoparticles and nanostructured surfaces to decrease antibiotic-resistant infections. Her passion is to bridge the gap between biology, engineering and medicine; to develop simple, inexpensive, easy-to-use, yet, broadly applicable platforms that will change the way in which medicine is practiced as well as how patients are monitored, diagnosed and treated for precision medicine.

Dr. Durmus has authored papers in journals including Nature Materials, PNAS, Advanced Materials and Nature Scientific Reports. Her work was recognized and highlighted by various prestigious journals and media outlets, such as Science, New Scientist, Popular Mechanics, AIP News, Tech Times. Her research achievements have been recognized with ITI Young Investigator Award from Stanford University, STAR Award Honorable Mention by the Society for Biomaterials, Graduate Student Recognition Award from Brown University, Entrepreneurial Fellowship from National Science Foundation (NSF) & Slater Technology Fund and Fulbright Scholarship. She was also a finalist for the national CIMIT Student Technology Prize for Primary Healthcare in 2012.