Founder-Directors

Saurabh Mehta, M.B.B.S., Sc.D. 
Dr. Mehta is a physician with training in infectious disease, nutrition, and epidemiology. The overarching focus of Dr. Mehta's research is to identify, diagnose, and intervene on modifiable risk factors such as nutrition to improve population health with advances in technological innovation an integral component. This is achieved through a combination of active surveillance programs, invention of smartphone diagnostics for nutrition and infection, and randomized controlled trials primarily in resource-limited settings in India, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. Dr. Mehta is currently the PI on a trial of vitamin D supplementation among patients with TB in South India. Dr. Mehta is also the PI on two large randomized efficacy trials to determine the effect of biofortified crops on nutrition and immune function in infants in the urban slums of Mumbai, India. With Dr. Erickson, Dr. Mehta has also invented the Cornell Nutriphone and FeverPhone to enable point-of-care diagnosis of both nutritional status and certain infections, respectively, using a smartphone. 

David Erickson, Ph.D. 
David Erickson is the Sibley College Professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. His research focuses on: mobile and global health technology, microfluidics, photonics, and nanotechnology. Prior to joining the faculty, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology and he received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto. Research in the Erickson lab is primarily funded through grants from the NSF, NIH, ARPA-E, ONR, DOE and DARPA. Prof. Erickson has helped to found numerous start-up companies commercializing: high-throughput nanoparticle analysis instrumentation, biomedical diagnostics, and mobile health technologies. In recent years, Dr. Erickson has received the DARPA-MTO Young Faculty Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the Department of Energy Early Career Award, among others. In 2011 he was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientist and Engineers (PECASE) by President Obama. For his efforts in co-founding the field of optofluidics, Erickson has been named a fellow of the Optical Society of America and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.