Iwijn De Vlaminck

Biography

Iwijn De Vlaminck is an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Cornell University. Iwijn’s research is focused on the development of precision medicine technologies to monitor and study infectious and immune related disease. His research has led to noninvasive liquid biopsies to diagnose organ transplant rejection, urinary tract infection, blood-borne infection and complications of stem cell transplantation. He developed methods to spatially map the microbiome and the transcriptome. Iwijn’s research was recognized with the NIH New Innovator Award, the Noyce Foundation Assistant Professorship in the Life Sciences and a Rainin Foundation Synergy Award. He received teaching excellence awards from the College of Engineering in 2017 and 2022. He is a co-founder of Kanvas Biosciences.

Our mission is to improve human health through the development of precision medicine technologies to study and diagnose infectious, immune and microbiome-associated disease. Our research brings approaches from engineering, biophysics, and computational biology to genomics and medicine.

We pursue research in two areas:

1. Liquid biopsies for infectious and immune-mediated disease: We investigate technologies and applications of circulating cell-free DNA in diagnostic medicine. We have developed molecular assays to obtain rich, sequence information from cell-free DNA in blood and urine, and computational methods to classify infectious and immune-mediated disease from cell-free DNA ‘omics data. We have demonstrated applications of these technologies in the monitoring of infection, host tissue injury due to infection, COVID-19, solid-organ transplant rejection, and graft-versus-host disease.
2. Digital spatial profiling of microbiomes and infection in complex tissues: We investigate single-cell and spatial sequencing technologies to study infection in native, complex tissues and to spatially profile bacterial microbiomes and host-microbiome interactions.

For regularly updated information, visit the De Vlaminck Lab website pages: 

• overview of research
• current and former group members
• recent publications

Visit our lab website for more information about our current research projects.

Research Interests

• Bioengineering
• Biomedical Engineering
• Molecular and Cellular Engineering
• Computational Science and Engineering
• Systems and Synthetic Biology