Institute of Bioengineering and the School of Engineering
Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Prof. Maerkl received B.S. degrees in Biology and in Chemistry from Fairleigh-Dickinson University in 2001. He then joined the Biophysics and Biochemistry Department at the California Institute of Technology and contributed to the early development of microfluidic technology and its application to protein biophysics in the laboratory of Prof. Stephen Quake. For his graduate work Prof. Maerkl was awarded the Demetriades-Tsafka-Kokalis prize for the best Caltech PhD thesis in the field of Biotechnology. He was also awarded 1st place at the Innovator’s Challenge, a competition amongst inventors and entrepreneurs from Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and Caltech. After graduating in 2008 Prof. Maerkl accepted a tenure track position at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in the Institute of Bioengineering and the School of Engineering, and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2015. Since 2008, Prof. Maerkl received numerous research grants and in 2015 was awarded an HFSP Program Grant and received an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016. His lab is currently working on a number of projects at the interface of microengineering, systems biology, synthetic biology, and molecular diagnostics.