Wilbur A Lam, MD, PhD

Wilbur Lam, MD, PhD, serves as Vice Provost for Entrepreneurship at Emory University, Associate Dean of Innovation and Professor of Pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine, W. Paul Bowers Research Chair at Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and Scientific Co-Director of the Pediatric Technology Center at Georgia Tech (PTC) for Children’s. Among other honors, Dr. Lam has been elected into the National Academy of Medicine, American Society of Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians. He has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors. He was named an Emerging Investigator by the journal, Lab on a Chip, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry and is recipient of a National Science Fair Career Award, the American Society of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology’s Frank A. Oski Memorial Lectureship Award and the Lab on a Chip Pioneers of Miniaturization Lectureship Award. He also received an Emerging Investigator Award from the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Lam has a unique background as a physician-scientist-engineer. He obtained his bachelor’s degree from Rice University, medical doctorate from Baylor College of Medicine and doctorate in bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Francisco, where he also completed his clinical training in pediatrics and pediatric hematology/oncology. Dr. Lam’s interdisciplinary laboratory comprises of bioengineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, biologists, chemists and physicians. His laboratory serves as a unique “one-stop shop” in which in vitro microsystems are developed to study the biophysics of hematologic processes in both health and disease and then translated to the patient bedside. Specifically, Dr. Lam’s lab’s research interests involve the development and application of microsystems to enable research in the biophysical mechanisms of hematologic diseases, such as sickle cell disease, and bleeding and thrombotic disorders, as well as further developing those systems into novel therapeutics and diagnostic devices.

As a bioengineering laboratory with interests in device development, Dr. Lam’s Lab has also developed diagnostic tools for hematologic and pediatric diseases that are inexpensive, simple to operate and can be used in resource-poor settings or as home-based, patient-operated self-tests. A particular interest of Dr. Lam’s is to couple these inexpensive diagnostics with smartphones to enable automated diagnosis and remote data transmission. To those ends, Dr. Lam has co-founded two companies focused on point-of-care diagnostics based on his laboratory’s research and one of their products, a color-based, disposable point-of-care anemia diagnostic was recently awarded U.S. Food and Drug Association clearance for commercialization. Dr. Lam is also the principal investigator of the Atlanta Center for Microsystems Engineering Point-Of-Care Technologies (ACME POCT) Pediatric Device Consortium, which is one of the five funded centers of the Nation Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Point-of-Care Technologies Research Network charged to facilitate the invention, development, clinical translation and commercialization of point-of-care diagnostics. Among other honors, Dr. Lam has been elected into the American Society of Clinical Investigation, named an Emerging Investigator by the journal Lab on a chip published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, and is recipient of a National Science Fair Career Award, as well as the American Society of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology’s Frank A. Oski Memorial Lectureship Award.