Maïwenn Kersaudy-Kerhoas

Maïwenn Kersaudy-Kerhoas is a Professor in Microfluidic Engineering in the School of Engineering and Physical Sciences at Heriot-Watt University. She is the co-academic lead for the Global Research Institute in Health & Care Technologies with Prof Robert Thomson. 

She holds a research MSc degree in micro and nanotechnologies from the Technical University of Lille (France), and an MSc degree from the Institut Superieur de l’Electronique et du Numerique (Brest-Lille, France). She was awarded a PhD at Heriot-Watt in July 2010. This study involved the development of a microfluidic chip for blood plasma extraction for detection of cell-free nucleic acids (DNA, RNA).  In 2012 she was awarded a five year Royal Academy of Engineering Fellowship to develop microfluidic systems for prenatal diagnostics. In 2014 she was elected as a member of EPSRC Early Career forum in Manufacturing Research and entered the Young Academy of Scotland. In 2018 she was awarded a £1M EPSRC Healthcare Technology Challenge Award to develop total pre-analytical systems for cfDNA extraction at the point-of-need. Using this award and pre-commercialisation funding from Scottish Enterprise High Growth Spin Out programme she created with her team CNASafe, and automated platform and patented fluidic cartridge for cfDNA extraction. This technology is now under clinical pilot for use in an integrated workflow (iSEP-SEQ) for the identification of sepsis-causing pathogens.