Steve Soper’s Biography

Steve Soper, Foundation Distinguished Professor, Director, Center of BioModular Multi-scale System for Precision Medicine, The University of Kansas

Prof. Steven A. Soper received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1989 followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked on single-molecule detection for high speed sequencing of the human genome. In 1991, he joined the faculty at Louisiana State University (LSU) within the Department of Chemistry, where he filled the William H. Pryor Distinguished Chair of Chemistry. Prof. Soper also had a joint appointment in the Mechanical Engineering Department and Department of Biological Sciences. While at LSU, he founded the Center for BioModular Multi-Scale Systems, which has as its primary charge to develop enabling and transformative tools for making environmental and health-related measurements at unprecedented speeds with full process automation directly in the field. Some of these tools include monitoring air and food/water supplies for biopathogens, determining bacterial/viral infections of unknown strains in patients, evaluating brain damage/injury, sampling blood for rare cells, such as tumor cells, and their molecular analysis and sequencing genomes in near real time. These tools consist of microfluidic and nanofluidic devices make in polymers via micro- or nanoreplication.

Prof. Soper is currently Foundation Distinguished Professor, Director, Center of BioModular Multi-scale System for Precision Medicine at the University of Kansas. Prof. Soper also holds a joint appointment at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in Ulsan, South Korea, where he is a World Class University Professor. Prof. Soper is currently the Editor of the Americas for the Analyst and on the Editorial Board for Journal of Fluorescence and Journal of Micro- and Nanosystems. Prof. Soper is currently serving as a permanent Member of the Nano study panel with the National Institutes of Health. As a result of his efforts, Prof. Soper has secured extramural funding totaling $45M and has published over 295 manuscripts (h index = 44) and is the author of ten patents. He is also the founder of a startup company, BioFluidica, which is marketing devices for the isolation and enumeration of rare cells. His list of awards includes Chemical Instrumentation by the American Chemical Society, the Benedetti-Pichler Award, Fellow of the AAAS, Fellow of Applied Spectroscopy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, R&D 100 Award, Distinguished Masters Award at LSU and Outstanding Scientist/Engineer of Louisiana in 2001. Finally, Prof. Soper has granted 40 PhDs and 5 MS students under his direction.