Prof Jens Ducrée
Full Professor, School of Physical Sciences
Jens Ducrée holds a Full Professorship of Microsystems in the School of Physical Sciences at Dublin City University (DCU). He has been the founding director of FPC@DCU – Ireland’s first Fraunhofer Project Centre for Embedded Bioanalytical Systems. Dr. Ducrée is also academic member of the National Centre for Sensor Research (NCSR) and the 3U Joint Institute of Global Health (JIGH), a principal investigator at the Biodesign Europe (BDE), and a member of the Institute of Ethics at DCU.
The main part of his research is directed towards novel microfluidic systems and associated technologies for the integration, automation, miniaturization and parallelization of common bioanalytical protocols. Typical applications of these next-generation “Lab-on-a-Chip” platforms are sample-to-answer devices for biomedical point-of-care and global diagnostics, liquid handling automation for the life sciences, process analytical techniques and cell line development for biopharma as well as monitoring the environment, infrastructure, industrial processes and agrifood. Dr. Ducrée has a keen interest in industrialisation of larger-scale integrated (LSI) Lab-on-a-Chip systems, which is boosted by platform strategies, design-for-manufacture and scale-up paradigms, digital twin concepts for virtual manufacture, testing, characterisation and optimisation, failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), and standardisation, to eventually expedite and de-risk research & technology development (RTD).
Dr. Ducrée also explores avenues for globalising and democratising science and RTD, which is leveraged by novel trends such as participatory crowdsourcing models and the cryptoeconomy based on 3rd-generation blockchains. In this context, Dr. Ducrée investigates synergies with highly disruptive 21st century technologies like digital manufacturing, artificial intelligence (AI), big data, internet of things (IoT), cloud computing and redistributed manufacturing (RDM). Accompanying these activities, Dr. Ducrée is a member of the national mirror committee (NMC) to ISO TC 307 (Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies) organised by the NSAI, the Government Blockchain Organization (GBA), and the bloxberg consortium initiated by Max Planck digital library (MPDL), and guest editor of Frontiers in Blockchain.