Benjamin Yellen

Benjamin Yellen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University and he also serves as the Chief Executive Officer of a startup company, Celldom, Inc.

Over the last 5 years, Ben’s research interests have focused mainly on the development of novel instruments for high resolution phenotyping and genotyping of single cells using microfluidic cell culture devices. These novel microfluidic devices and imaging strategies are capable of organizing a high density array of single cells, and continuously monitor cell proliferation over many days in the presence of different drug therapies. He has also developed methods for high resolution transcriptional profiling of single cells, or single cell derived clones, by patterning DNA barcoded primers in each chamber of the microfluidic device.

He formed a startup company, Celldom, which aims to commercialize this technology to enable researchers to make fundamental advances in the detection and analysis of minimum residual disease, understand the immune system via longitudinal monitoring of single cell and single cell-pair responses, and also make better insights into neurology, basic research and synthetic biology.