Stephen R. Quake

Pioneer in the field of microfluidics and single molecule biophysics. Invented microfluidic large scale integration by fabricating devices with thousands of integrated micromechanical valves; this technology redefined the field, and is the biological analog of integrated circuits. With James Berger, showed that the novel fluid physics of these devices enables manipulation of protein crystallization in unique ways. Their work was commercialized and used to grow crystals and solve structures from proteins that resisted conventional attempts. Developed a microfluidic assay for high sensitivity parallelized interaction measurements and measured the affinities of several transcription factors to all possible DNA sequences. These free energy landscapes allowed prediction of genes regulated by these transcription factors. Work in single cell genomics paved the way to genomic analysis of unculturable microbes, single cell human genome analysis, and eukaryotic single cell RNA expression analysis. Research in single molecule biophysics led to the first single molecule DNA sequencing; commercialization resulted in the first sequencer capable of sequencing the human genome with a single instrument. Demonstrated innovative uses of his sequencing technologies in areas as diverse as non-invasive prenatal diagnostics and analysis of immune repertoires.