Daniel Fletcher, Ph.D. is the Purnendu Chatterjee Professor of Bioengineering and Biophysics at UC Berkeley, where his research explores organizational principles of the cell membrane and cytoskeleton, mechanotransduction in cancer and infectious diseases, and development of biomedical technologies for global health.
He received a B.S.E. from Princeton University, a D.Phil. from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. After a postdoctoral fellowship in the Stanford University School of Medicine, he began his faculty career in the Department of Bioengineering at UC Berkeley, where he continues to teach courses on optics, microscopy, and cell mechanics.
Prof. Fletcher’s research has received numerous awards, including an NSF CAREER Award, a Tech Laureate Award from the San Jose Tech Museum, and a “Best of What’s New” designation by Popular Science magazine. He has served as a White House Fellow in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, was elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and previously held the Lester John and Lynne Dewar Lloyd Distinguished Professorship at UC Berkeley.
Prof. Fletcher’s mobile phone-based biomedical technologies, known as “CellScope”, are being tested in multiple countries for disease diagnostic applications and have been supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID, and other sources. He and his laboratory are known for development of new optical and force microscopy tools to study cell mechanics, and for innovative research on the membrane and cytoskeletal structures that animate cell movements, work supported by the NIH, NSF, and DOE.
Prof. Fletcher is also Deputy Director of the Physical Biosciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; a faculty affiliate of the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, the Blum Center for Developing Economies, the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), and the Center for Emerging and Neglected Diseases (CEND); as well as a member of the Bioengineering, Biophysics, and Nanoscale Science and Engineering Graduate Groups at UC Berkeley.