Professional Experience

Elizabeth Wheeler is a staff scientist working in S Program and a group leader in the Materials Engineering Division. She began her career at LLNL as a post-doctoral researcher working on NIF optics prior to joining the Center for Micro and Nano Technology. She has been involved with bioinstrumentation at LLNL for 14 years. The majority of her career has focused on integrating biology and engineering to yield new platforms or flexible devices for Homeland Security or medical applications. She has worked on numerous multidisciplinary teams that have field tested technology developed at LLNL. Currently she is a team member on a Bioprinting Vasculature project and the Principal Investigator for a DNA Tagged Reagents for Aerosol Experiments (DNATrax) project. In 2013, she won an R&D 100 award for her contributions to DNATrax. Her primary focus is currently the LDRD SI in-situ Chip-based Human Investigational Platform (iCHIP) project.

Research Interests

Elizabeth’s research interests include the experimental study of complex fluid flows for exploitation in new applications or devices and optical characterization techniques for biological/chemical processing, detection, and investigation of material properties and automating sample preparation, especially for low-copy-number or trace samples for both forensic and biodefense purposes. Her current research interests are focused on integrating biology onto novel engineering platforms.

Ph.D., Chemical Engineering, Stanford University, 1998

M.S., Chemical Engineering, Stanford University, 1994

B.S., Chemical Engineering, University of California at Davis, 1993

E. K. Wheeler, B. R. Baker, W. T. Piggott, S. L. Mabery, C. M. Hara, J. DeOtte, W. Benett, E. V. Mukerjee, J. Dzenitis, and N. R. Beer, "On-Chip Laser-Induced DNA Dehybridization," Analyst, 2013.

M. M. Packard, E. K. Wheeler, E. C. Alocilja, and M. Shusteff, “Performance evaluation of fast microfluidic thermal lysis of bacteria for diagnostic sample preparation,” Diagnostics 3(1), pp. 105–116, 2013.

E. K. Wheeler, C. Hara, J. Frank, J. DeOtte, S. Hall, W. J. Benett, C. M. Spadaccini, and N. R. Beer, "Under-three-minute PCR: Probing the limits of fast amplification," Analyst 136, pp. 3707–3712, 2011.

K. Youngeun, C. A. Hara, M. G. Knize, M. H. Hwang, K. S. Venkateswaran, E. K. Wheeler, P. M. Bell, R. F. Renzi, J. A. Fruetal, and C. G. Bailey, "Magnetic Bead Based Immunoassay for Autonomous Detection of Toxins," Analytical Chemistry 80(22), pp. 8416–8423, 2008.

N. R. Beer, E. K. Wheeler, L. Lee-Houghton, N. Watkins, S. Nasarabadi, N. Hebert, P. Leung, D. W. Arnold, C. G. Bailey, and B. W. Colston, “On-chip single-copy real-time reverse-transcription PCR in isolated picoliter droplets,” Anal. Chem., 2008.

E. K. Wheeler, B. Benett, P. Stratton, J. Richards, A. Christian, A. Chen, T. Weisgraber, K. Ness, J. Ortega, L. Li, K. Goodson, and F. Milanovich, "Convectively Driven Polymerase Chain Reaction Thermal Cycler," Anal. Chem. 76(14), pp. 4011–4016, 2004.