Dr. Dan Fletcher is the department chair in the bioengineering department and biological systems program at the University of California, Berkeley, where his research focuses on the biophysics of cell movements and the cytoskeleton and development of biomedical devices. Recent work from his laboratory includes direct measurement of the actin networks that drive crawling motility, development of vesicle encapsulation technology for cellular reconstitution, and demonstration of fluorescence microscopy on a mobile phone.
Fletcher received a B.S.E. from Princeton University and a D.Phil. from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He received a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University as an NSF graduate research fellow and was a postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry at the Stanford University School of Medicine as part of the Stanford Bio-X program. His research has received an NSF CAREER Award, a National Inventors Hall of Fame Collegiate Award, and was designated “Best of What’s New” by Popular Science magazine.
Last year Fletcher was named a White House Fellow and worked with the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. He is also deputy director of the physical biosciences division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), faculty affiliate of the QB3 and CITRIS Institutes at UC Berkeley, a member of the bioengineering, biophysics, and nanoscale science and engineering graduate groups, and deputy director of the Cell Propulsion Lab, an NIH Nanomedicine Development Center based at UCSF.
