Adela Ben-Yakar is a Harry L. Kent Jr. Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and a member of the Graduate Student Council in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Engineering (2000) and completed a postdoctoral work at Stanford University in the Applied Physics Department and Harvard University in the Physics Department (2000-2004).

Her research focuses in three main research directions. 1) Ultrafast laser microsurgery and nonlinear imaging, as applied to clinical image-guided surgery and diagnostics systems for treatment of disease such as spinal decompression, scarred vocal folds, and cervical cancer. 2) Development of high-throughput opto-fluidic systems for high-content testing using organoids and small model organism, C. elegans, as applied to drug discovery, toxicity testing, nerve regeneration, and neurodegenerative diseases. 3) Development of ultrafast imaging modalities and instrumentation for 3D imaging flow cytometry and kHz volumetric imaging of brain function (LEAD – Line excitation array detection microscopy).

Dr. Ben-Yakar is also the CEO of a life sciences startup, vivoVerse Holdings, Inc. which she co-founded it together with two of her team members. As an exclusive licensee of many patents from the Ben-Yakar Lab, vivoVerse strives to reduce animal testing by providing high-content testing of chemicals and drugs using C. elegans and organoids. VivoVerse uses patented vivoChip and OrganoidChip microfluidic devices to enable high-resolution imaging of samples and rapid and accurate analysis using AI/ML-assisted phenotypic analysis pipelines.

Dr. Ben-Yakar is an elected Fellow of the Optica, SPIE, and AIMBE, and a member of IEEE, ASME, SLAS, SOT among others. She was the Faculty Investment Initiative Program Fellow and Endowed Faculty Fellow of the Mr. N. Doug Williams Memorial Centennial Fellowship in Engineering. She is the recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, Zonta Amelia Earhart Award, NSF Career Award, Human Frontier Science Program Research Award, and NIH Director’s Transformative Award.