Professor Cunningham has been a faculty member in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the department Bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 2004, following a 15-year career in Industry. Prof. Cunningham’s technical focus is the utilization of photonics for biosensing in applications that include life science research, diagnostics, environmental monitoring, and pharmaceutical screening. He has over 90 issued US patents and over 200 peer reviewed journal publications. He is a Fellow of NAI, IEEE, Optica, RSC, AAAS, and AIMBE. He serves as the Director of the Center for Genomic Diagnostics at the Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, and as a Program Leader for the Cancer Center at Illinois on the topic of Cancer Measurement Technology and Data Science. In 2023, his technical contributions were recognized by Optica by the Michael S. Feld Biophotonics Award.

Our lab is interested in understanding the function of lipids, particularly the sphingolipid ceramide, in neural development and neurodegeneration. We have discovered that ceramide is enriched in membranes and compartments (ceramide-enriched compartments) that are critical for the function of primary and motile cilia in neural progenitor cells in brain development and exosomes in Alzheimer's disease. Current and future research is focused on understanding specific ceramide-protein interactions that regulate cell signaling in stem and neuroprogenitor cells, glial cells, and neurons.

1986: MS in Biochemistry, University of Cologne, Germany 1990: PhD in Biochemistry, University of Cologne, Germany 1990-1996: Post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Physiol. Chemistry, University of Bonn, Germany 1996-2000: Instructor and then Assistant Professor (1999) at the Department of Biochemistry, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA 2000-2017: Assistant, Associate (2004), and then full Professor (2011, tenured) at the Department of Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine, Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, Augusta, GA 2017: Full Professor at the Department of Physiology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, GA.

Prof. Soper (since 2016) is a Foundation Distinguished Professor in Chemistry and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Kansas. At KUMC, Prof. Soper holds an adjunct appointment in the Cancer Biology Department and is a member of the KU Cancer Center. He also holds an appointment at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in Ulsan, South Korea, where he is a World Class University Professor.

As a result of his efforts, Prof. Soper has secured extramural funding totaling >$125M, has published over 245 peer-reviewed manuscripts (h index = 70; >17,000 citations); 31 book chapters and 71 peer-reviewed conference proceeding papers, and is the author of 12 patents. He is also the founder of a startup company, BioFluidica, which is marketing devices for the isolation and enumeration of liquid biopsy markers. Soper recently founded a second company, Sunflower Genomics, which is seeking to market a new DNA/RNA single-molecule sequencing platform. His list of awards includes Ralph Adams Award in Bioanalytical Chemistry, Chemical Instrumentation by the American Chemical Society, the Benedetti-Pichler Award for Microchemistry, Fellow of the AAAS, Fellow of Applied Spectroscopy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, R&D 100 Award, Distinguished Masters Award at LSU and Outstanding Scientist/Engineer in the state of Louisiana in 2001. Finally, Prof. Soper has granted 50 PhDs and 7 MS degrees to students under his mentorship. He currently heads a group of 15 researchers.

His major discoveries include: (1) Technology for the detection of liquid biopsy markers that can manage a variety of diseases using a simple blood test (test has been demonstrated in multiple myeloma, pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia, acute myeloid leukemia, pancreatic, breast, colorectal, prostate, and ovarian cancers); (2) new hardware and assay for the point-of-care diagnosis of acute ischemic stroke; (3) single-molecule DNA and RNA sequencing nanotechnology; and (4) currently working on a home-test for COVID-19 infections (handheld instrument and the associated assay.

Sven Kreutel studied biology at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany. After his graduation in biology, he received his PhD in microbiology and protein biochemistry at the University of Hohenheim under Prof. Dr. Andreas Kuhn and Dr. Dorothee Kiefer working on the light sensing and signal transduction in photosynthetic bacteria. Since then, he worked in different sales and sales manager positions within the life science industry from clinical research over biology to nanoparticle sciences.