Adam R Hall, Ph.D

Adam R. Hall earned his PhD in Applied and Materials Sciences from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 2007 where he fabricated and studied nanoelectromechanical systems built on single carbon nanotubes. After graduating, he accepted a postdoctoral position in the laboratory of Prof. Dr. Cees Dekker at the Technische Universiteit Delft in the Netherlands where he applied his expertise to the study and development of solid-state nanopores. Among his accomplishments during this time was implementation of a combined optical tweezer-nanopore instrument to probe electrophoretic forces on DNA-protein complexes inside nanopores and the first demonstration of a hybrid device composed of a protein pore integrated with a fabricated solid-state nanopore. In 2010, Dr. Hall joined the University of North Carolina Greensboro as a founding faculty in the Department of Nanoscience. While at UNCG, he served as director of the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoegnineering microscopy facility and pioneered new methods for fabricating solid-state nanopores that have significantly improved throughput and propelled advancement of the field. In 2013, he relocated to the Wake Forest University School of Medicine where he is currently an Associate Professor in the Virginia Tech-Wake Forest School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences with appointments in the departments of Physics, Molecular Genetics and Genomics, Cancer Biology, Integrative Physiology & Pharmacology, and the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. He is also a member of the Wake Forest Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Since joining the faculty of Wake Forest, Dr. Hall’s lab has focused largely on implementing solid-state nanopores and other nano- and microtechnologies into translational applications. Among his accomplishments in this space, he has developed a novel method for performing selective detection of nucleic acid biomarkers, a sensitive analytical technique for probing glycans, and a microfluidic assay for 3D cell culture migration and invasion. He is a past recipient of the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty award and has received funding for his work from NIH (NCI, NIGMS, NHGRI), BARDA, and the North Carolina Biotechnology Center among others. He has authored publications in several top journals including Nature Nanotechnology and Nano Letters, has a current h-index of 32, and is inventor on 6 patents.