Steven Soper, Ph.D

Professor Steven A. Soper received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1989, followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked on single-molecule detection for high speed sequencing of the human genome. In 1991, he joined the faculty at Louisiana State University, LSU, within the Department of Chemistry, where he filled the William H. Pryor Distinguished Chair of Chemistry. Professor Soper also held joint appointments in the Mechanical Engineering Department and Department of Biological Sciences. While at LSU, he founded the Center for BioModular Multi-Scale Systems, which has as its primary charge to develop enabling and transformative tools for making health-related measurements at unprecedented speeds with full process automation directly at the Point-of-Care. Some of these tools include integrated systems for determining bacterial/viral infections of unknown strains in patients, evaluating brain damage/injury, sampling blood for rare cells such as circulating tumor cells and their molecular analysis, and sequencing genomes in near real time. These tools consist of microfluidic and nanofluidic devices made in polymers via micro- and/or nanoreplication.

Professor Soper is currently a Foundation Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Kansas. He also holds an appointment at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in Ulsan, South Korea, where he is a World Class University Professor. He is also serving as a Science Advisor for a number of major worldwide companies, such as Roche Diagnostics and EMD Millipore. Professor Soper is also the Editor of the Americas for the Analyst and on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Fluorescence and Journal of Micro- and Nanosystems. Professor Soper is also serving as a permanent Member of the Nanotechnology study panel with the National Institutes of Health.

As a result of his efforts, Professor Soper has secured extramural funding totaling more than $47M and has published over 260 manuscripts, h index = 56, and is the author of 12 patents. He is also the founder of a startup company, BioFluidica, which is marketing devices for the isolation and enumeration of circulating tumor cells. His list of awards includes Chemical Instrumentation from the American Chemical Society, the Benedetti-Pichler Award for Microchemistry, Fellow of the AAAS, Fellow of Applied Spectroscopy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, R&D 100 Award, Distinguished Masters Award at LSU and Outstanding Scientist/Engineer in the state of Louisiana in 2001. Finally, Professor Soper has granted 40 PhD and 5 MS degrees to students under his mentorship.