Cullen Buie
Cullen R. Buie is an African American mechanical engineer specializing in microbial fuel cells.
Life and career[edit]
Education[edit]
Buie's passions changed during high school when he attended an engineering camp that gave him the opportunity to receive college credits and scholarships.[1] This led him to study mechanical engineering at Ohio State University, receiving his Bachelors of Science in 2003.[2] He then went on to earn a Master of Science (M.S.) in 2005 at Stanford University, as well as his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D) in 2009 in mechanical engineering.[1] At Stanford, he was a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow, working under Juan Santiago.[3] While working towards his Ph.D, Buie worked on microfluidic electro-osmotic pumps for fuel cells at Stanford.
Career[edit]
After graduating Stanford in 2009, Buie began teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2010.[3] During his teaching career, Buie had also worked on numerous of research labs. In 2010, he worked on microbial fuel cells at UC Berkeley. In 2012, he was working alongside a team in Australia to test the effectiveness of bacteria in these microbial fuel cells.[1] Buie is the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, and leads the Laboratory for Energy and Microsystems Innovation (LEMI).[3]
Cullen Buie is a co-founder of a startup called Kytopen, which has created a technology called Flowfect. This new technology gives scientists a way to mass-produce genetically engineered cells as it opens the pores of cells to deliver genetic material.[3][4]
Awards[edit]
Cuie has received the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award to investigate the challenge of getting genetic material into bacterial cells.[4] He has also received the NSF CAREER Award and the Presidential Early Career Award named by Barack Obama.[2]
Personal life[edit]
Buie's older sister, Simone, is the motivation for his research as she had died due to a bacterial infection, sepsis.[1] In disbelief that individuals were still dying from common bacterial infections, Buie and his team are actively researching to eliminate this issue.[3]
References[edit]
- ^ a b c d Extance, Andy (2016-08-01). "Cullen Buie Parses Pathogens With Passion". The Scientist Magazine. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
- ^ a b "Alumnus Cullen R. Buie to be Honored with Presidential Early Career Award". Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Ohio State University. 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
- ^ a b c d e Couch, Christina (2018-04-25). "Engineering microbial worlds". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2023-07-14.
- ^ a b Gallagher, Mary Beth (2023-02-03). "3 Questions: Cullen Buie on a new era for cell therapies". MIT News. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved 2023-07-14.