Iwijn De Vlaminck | Cornell Engineering

Biography

Iwijn De Vlaminck trained in applied physics (Ph.D., KULeuven), single molecule biophysics (postdoc, TUDelft) and precision medicine (HHMI research associate, Stanford University). His most recent research has led to the development of sensitive blood tests to diagnose organ transplant rejection, already widely used, the Karius blood test to screen for infection from blood, used in more than 400 US hospitals, RNA liquid biopsy technologies to monitor inflammatory disease, technologies to spatially map RNA in tissues, and highly multiplexed imaging methods to map the biogeography of the human microbiome. He is an elected fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering and a recipient of the NIH New Innovator and NIH MERIT awards. He is a co-founder of Kanvas Biosciences and Romix Biosciences.

Research Interests

Our lab’s mission is to improve human health through the development of high-throughput measurement technologies for biology and medicine. We are focused on tools 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:

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 pioneered 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.
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 more information, visit our lab webpage.

Select Publications

Plasma Cell-free RNA Signatures of Inflammatory Syndromes in Children. Conor J. Loy, Venice Servellita, Alicia Sotomayor-Gonzalez, Andrew Bliss, Joan Lenz, Emma Belcher, Will Suslovic, Jenny Nguyen, Meagan E. Williams, Miriam Oseguera, Michael A. Gardiner, Pediatric Emergency Medicine Kawasaki Disease Research Group (PEMKDRG), The CHARMS Study Group, Jong-Ha Choi, Hui-Mien Hsiao, Hao Wang, Jihoon Kim, Chisato Shimizu, Adriana Tremoulet, Meghan Delaney, Roberta L. DeBiasi, Christina A. Rostad, Jane C. Burns, Charles Y. Chiu, Iwijn De Vlaminck, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024).
A Spatiotemporal Molecular Atlas of the Ovulating Mouse Ovary, Madhav Mantri, Hanxue Hannah Zhang, Emmanuel Spanos, Yi A Ren, Iwijn De Vlaminck, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024).
Spatial mapping of the total transcriptome by in situ polyadenylation, David W. McKellar, Madhav Mantri, Meleana Hinchman, John S.L. Parker, Praveen Sethupathy, Benjamin D. Cosgrove, Iwijn De Vlaminck, Nature Biotechnology (2023).
Highly Multiplexed Spatial Mapping of Microbial Communities. Hao Shi, Qiaojuan Shi, Benjamin Grodner, Joan Sesing Lenz, Warren Zipfel, Ilana Brito, Iwijn De Vlaminck. Nature (2020).
Circulating Cell-Free DNA Enables Noninvasive Diagnosis of Heart Transplant Rejection, Iwijn De Vlaminck, Hannah A. Valantine, Thomas M. Snyder, Calvin Strehl, Garrett Cohen, Helen Luikart, Norma F. Neff, Jennifer Okamoto, Daniel Bernstein, Dana Weisshaar, Stephen R. Quake, and Kiran K. Khush. Science Translational Medicine, 6, 241ra77 (2014).

Full publications list at Iwijn De Vlaminck's Google Scholar

Select Awards and Honors

Elected Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering 2025
NIH MERIT (R37) award, converted from R01, MPI with Dr. Brian Rudd 2025
Dorothy and Fred Chau (2022), Robert and Vanne Cowie (2017) Excellence in Teaching Awards 2022, 2017
Research Excellence Award Cornell College of Engineering 2020
NIH Director’s New Innovator Award 2017