Michael C Murphy, Ph.D

Michael Murphy, a Roy O. Martin Lumber Company Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, received his BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University in 1977, and an MS in Aeronautics from Caltech in 1978. Between 1978-1985 he was with the Missile Systems Group of Hughes Aircraft Company in Canoga Park, CA, as a member of the technical staff and staff doctoral fellow. He earned his Ph.D. from MIT in Mechanical Engineering in 1990 and spent the next two years as an instructor for design there, before joining the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge in 1992. He spent 1992-1993 as a visiting scientist at the Institut für Mikrostrukturtechnik at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, IMT-FzK. At LSU, he helped establish the microsystems research facilities and program. In 1995, he was awarded an NSF CAREER proposal for work in medical applications of microsystems. He spent his sabbatical in 2005 at the Center for Engineering in Medicine with Dr. Mehmet Toner.

Professor Murphy's research is focused on biomedical applications of microsystems and modular micro-/nanofluidic systems. The work on modular systems addresses the factors affecting the limits of modularity and includes work on the use of passive alignment structures in polymer devices, <12 µm, thermal isolation of temperature zones in stacked and planar modules, highly parallel micro-titer plate formatted systems with microfluidic reactors at each well location, demonstration of gasketless seal technology, two phase flow for high throughput, and high flow rate capture of target cells, 750 µL/min. His group has also pioneered novel tools for assembling multi-scale polymer microfluidic systems. These have been applied to a diverse set of biomedical applications including CTC capture, rapid thermal reactors for mutation detection using PCR/LDR, and the characterization of the type of stroke.