Prof. Denis Wirtz
Johns Hopkins University, USA
Through research at the interface of physics, biology, and oncology, Wirtz has made seminal contributions in cancer cell migration, cytoskeleton biophysics, mechanobiology, 3D imaging, and immuno-oncology. He has developed quantitative methods, including particle-tracking microrheology, multi-compartment organoids and high-throughput cell migration. He has also pioneered research in cell migration in 3D settings, bacterial cell division, high-throughput cell phenotyping, and more recently in CAR T cell engineering. Recently, he has developed CODA, a, AI-based method to image large volumes of tissues and tumors in 3D dimensions. Denis Wirtz has founded the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoaBioTechnology (INBT). He is the Director of the NCI-funded postdoctoral training program in nanotechnology for oncology and. Director of the NCI-funded Physical Sciences-Oncology Center (PS-OC) and the Johns Hopkins Cellular Cancer Biology Imaging Cancer (CCBIR) Center. Wirtz is author and co-author of 250 peer-reviewed articles published in journals such as Science, Nature, Cell, Nature Reviews Cancer, and Nature Cell Biology. His work at Hopkins has been cited >34,000 times and has an h-index of 99. Wirtz received the NSF Career award in 1995, was named Theophilius H. Smoot Professor of Engineering and Science in 2009, fellow of the Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) in 2007, fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2009, and fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2010, and member of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium. Wirtz received a physics engineering degree from the Free University of Brussels in 1988, and MSc and PhD in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University in 1993. Wirtz has been the Vice Provost for Research of Johns Hopkins University since 2014.