James P. Landers

Biography

 Landers is a professor of chemistry and mechanical engineering at the University of Virginia, as well as an associate professor of pathology at the University of Virginia Health System. He earned his bachelor of science degree in biochemistry with a minor in biomedicine and his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Guelph in Ontario (Canada). After a year as a post-doctoral fellow at the Banting Institute at the University of Toronto School of Medicine, as a Canadian Medical Research Council (MRC) Fellow at the Mayo Clinic-Rochester, he studied cancer biology and diagnostics under Thomas Spelsberg, a renowned breast cancer biochemist. He launched and directed Mayo Clinic’s Clinical Capillary Electrophoresis Facility in the department of laboratory medicine and pathology, developing clinical assays based on capillary electrophoretic technology. Landers joined the chemistry department at the University of Pittsburgh, where he forayed into analytical microfluidic systems with the goal of developing the next generation molecular diagnostics platform. This research was bolstered by the move to the University of Virginia where access to a dedicated class-100 cleanroom for microchip fabrication allowed for rapid prototyping of microdevices for separations, DNA purification, and DNA amplification. His research group was among the first to generate a fully integrated lab-on-a-chip (PNAS 103:19272, 2006), successfully applied to detecting infectious agents in biofluids and cancer diagnostics as well as defining new approaches to fluidic control on microchips (NATURE Physics 5:231, 2009) and a new simple, cost-effective fabrication for microfluidic devices without clean room facilities (NATURE Protocols 10:875, 2015). He has authored more than 250 papers and 25 book chapters on topics as diverse as receptor biochemistry, capillary electrophoretic method development, microchip fabrication, forensic DNA analysis and integrated microfluidic systems for application to both the clinical and forensic arenas. In addition, he has recently completed the third in the succession of editions of CRC Press Handbook of Capillary Electrophoresis, with this one extrapolated to microchip electrophoresis and associated microtechniques.

Research Interest

 Biochemistry, Forensic Science, Molecular Biology, Business Management