School of Engineering
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James Swartz
Emeritus Faculty, Academic Council, Chemical Engineering
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsProgram Overview
The world we enjoy, including the oxygen we breathe, has been beneficially created by biological systems. Consequently, we believe that innovative biotechnologies can also serve to help correct a natural world that non-natural technologies have pushed out of balance. We must work together to provide a sustainable world system capable of equitably improving the lives of over 10 billion people.
Toward that objective, our program focuses on human health as well as planet health. To address particularly difficult challenges, we seek to synergistically combine: 1) the design and evolution of complex protein-based nanoparticles and enzymatic systems with 2) innovative, uniquely capable cell-free production technologies.
To advance human health we focus on: a) achieving the 120 year-old dream of producing “magic bullets”; smart nanoparticles that deliver therapeutics or genetic therapies only to specific cells in our bodies; b) precisely designing and efficiently producing vaccines that mimic viruses to stimulate safe and protective immune responses; and c) providing a rapid point-of-care liquid biopsy that will count and harvest circulating tumor cells.
To address planet health we are pursuing biotechnologies to: a) inexpensively use atmospheric CO2 to produce commodity biochemicals as the basis for a new carbon negative chemical industry, and b) mitigate the intermittency challenges of photovoltaic and wind produced electricity by producing hydrogen either from biomass sugars or directly from sunlight.
More than 25 years ago, Professor Swartz began his pioneering work to develop cell-free biotechnologies. The new ability to precisely focus biological systems toward efficiently addressing new, “non-natural” objectives has proven tremendously useful as we seek to address the crucial and very difficult challenges listed above. Another critical feature of the program is the courage (or naivete) to approach important objectives that require the development and integration of several necessary-but- not-sufficient technology advances. -
Paul Täufer
Ph.D. Student in Bioengineering, admitted Autumn 2026
Language Conversation Partner, Student Learning SupportBioPaul is a graduate physics student from Germany interested in research at the intersection of biology, medicine, engineering, and physics.
At Stanford, he is researching the biophysics of immune cells, focusing on NETosis, a process by which certain immune cells, particularly neutrophils, release extracellular traps (NETs) composed of DNA, histones, antimicrobial and cytotoxic proteins to capture and neutralize pathogens. This process plays a crucial role in the immune system's defense against infections but can also damage the host and correlate with the worsening of chronic inflammatory diseases. In particular, Paul investigates how membrane fluidity impacts membrane tension and the downstream cellular process of NETosis. He ultimately aims to comprehensively characterize NETosis and its influence on plasma membrane biophysics, shedding light on the underlying mechanisms of immune response. -
Sindy Tang
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor, by courtesy, of Radiology and of Bioengineering
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsProf. Sindy K.Y. Tang develops engineering platforms that measure biological systems and convert these measurements into quantitative datasets. Her research focuses on experimental systems that probe biological processes across cellular and tissue scales, particularly how physical context—geometry, mechanics, and spatial organization—shapes biological function. Current work spans immune diagnostics, spatial tissue sampling for multi-omics analysis, and single-cell perturbation studies.
