ryan fobel

Ryan Fobel is a biomedical engineer, hardware hacker, and entrepreneur based in Toronto, Canada. He completed his PhD in Aaron Wheeler’s at the University of Toronto in 2015 working on a droplet-based digital microfluidic platform for general purpose automation of biology and chemistry. He released the designs (affectionately known as [DropBot](http://microfluidics.utoronto.ca)) as open-source hardware in 2013 and there are now more than 20 of these systems in labs around the world where they are used for applications ranging from cell biology to environmental testing and synthetic biology. Ryan is active in the open science hardware community ([GOSH](http://openhardware.science/), [Hackteria](https://www.hackteria.org/)) and has recently been busy field-testing DropBots for point-of-care diagnostics applications (e.g., measles and rubella) in Kenya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He recently co-founded a startup called [Sci-Bots](http://sci-bots.com) to develop tools for automating and miniaturizing biology.