Professor, Biological and Environmental Engineering
Mingming Wu is a Professor in the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering. She was drawn to the field of biological engineering by her admiration of the exquisite micro- and nano-scale machinery found in the natural world. She leads the Biofluidics Lab, which develops micro- and nano-scale technologies for solving contemporary biological, medical, and environmental problems. Her lab gains inspiration by exploring how tiny cells (often 1/10th of the width of a hair) move within a given microenvironment. Her lab motto is to see the unseeable and to measure the unmeasurable, all though the development of new technologies.
A new study examines how a cyanobacteria manipulates its environment to give itself advantages to take over the water column, leading to harmful algal blooms and mats in lakes during hot summers.
A hard-working bacterium may soon have a large influence on processing rare-earth elements that help run smartphones, electric cars and wind turbines in an eco-friendly way.