Lydia L. Sohn

Lydia L. Sohn received her A.B. (Chemistry and Physics, 1988), M.S. (Physics, 1990), and Ph.D. (Physics, 1992) from Harvard University. She was an NSF/NATO postdoc at Delft University of Technology and a postdoc at AT&T Bell Laboratories (1993-1995). Sohn was an Assistant Professor of Physics at Princeton University prior to joining the Mechanical Engineering Dept. at UC Berkeley in 2003. In addition to being Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Sohn is a core-member of the UC San Francisco-UC Berkeley Graduate Program in Bioengineering and is currently serving as a member of the program's Executive Committee . Her work focuses on developing quantitative techniques to probe single cells, as they relate to cancer and stem cells. Sohn has received numerous awards including the NSF CAREER, Army of Research Young Investigator Award, DuPont Young Professor Award, and a Bakar Fellowship. In 2010, Sohn received the prestigious W. M. Keck Foundation Medical Research award to develop a label-free method for screening and sorting rare cells. In 2014, Sohn’s developed label-free method—Node-Pore Sensing (NPS)—was named one of five “Revolutionary Platform Technologies for Advancing Life Sciences Research” in a competition sponsored by 6 major foundations, including the W. M. Keck Foundation, Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, Kavli Foundation, Burroughs-Wellcome Fund, John Templeton Foundation, and Research Corporation. She is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and a Chancellor's Professor at UC Berkeley.