Mingming Wu PhD

Mingming Wu is a Professor in the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering. She was drawn to the field of biological engineering by her admiration of the exquisite micro-and nano-scale machinery found in the natural world. She is leading a lab that develops micro-and nano-scale technologies for solving contemporary biological, medical, and environmental problems. Her lab gains inspiration by exploring how tiny cells (often 1/10th of the width of a hair) move within a given microenvironment. Her lab motto is to see the unseeable and to measure the unmeasurable, all through the development of new technologies.

Professor Wu's research lab studies molecular mechanisms with which cells sense and migrate, using an integrated microsystems engineering and theoretical modeling approach. She and her students develop microfluidic systems to provide cells with well-defined and physiologically realistic 3D microenvironments (e.g., chemical gradients, fluid flows, and biometrics). They also develop and utilize advanced microscopic imaging systems to quantify cellular dynamics. Their current focus is on the roles of the tumor cell microenvironment in cancer cell chemoinvasion and its implications in cancer metastasis.