Iwijn De Vlaminck | Cornell Engineering

Biography

Iwijn De Vlaminck is an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Cornell University. His research focuses 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.

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
Dorothy and Fred Chau, M.S. 74 Excellence in Teaching Award 2022
BMES-CMBE Rising Star Junior Faculty Award 2021
Research Excellence Award Cornell College of Engineering 2020
Rainin Foundation Synergy Award 2019
Inspiring mentor Merrill Scholars program, Cornell University 2019
Robert ’55 and Vanne ’57 Cowie Excellence in Teaching Award 2017
NIH Director’s New Innovator Award 2017
Robert N. Noyce Assistant Professorship in Life Science and Technology, selected by Provost 2015