LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

James Landers is a Jefferson Scholars Fellow and Commonwealth Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and an Associate Professor of Pathology at the University of Virginia.  He co-founded MicroLab Diagnostics in 2008 where he has served as a CSO.  MicroLab entered into partnership with Lockheed Martin in 2008 in a project focused on delivering a microfluidic DNA analysis platform for forensic analysis.  In 2010, MicroLab merged with ZyGEM Corp. to leverage the powerful suite of reagents they had developed and build on the company’s synergies around nucleic acid extraction and detection.  That company currently exists as MicroGEM International.

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James received his Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry with a minor in Biomedicine at the University of Guelph in Ontario (Canada) in 1984.  He earned his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the same department in 1988.  After a one-year post-doctoral fellowship at the Banting Institute at the University of Toronto’s School of Medicine, he was awarded a Canadian Medical Research Council (MRC) Fellowship to study cancer biology and diagnostics under Dr. Thomas Spelsberg, a breast cancer biochemist at the Mayo Clinic.  He launched and directed the Clinical Capillary Electrophoresis Facility in the Department of Lab Medicine and Pathology at Mayo developing clinical assays using capillary electrophoretic technology.

Research efforts have focused on generating rapid prototype microdevices for separations, DNA purification and DNA amplification, as well as devices that fluidically-integrate on-chip sample preparation with analysis.  In addition to editing three editions of the Handbook of Capillary Electrophoresis, he has authored more than 265 peer-reviewed papers and 25 book chapters ranging from receptor biochemistry and capillary electrophoretic method development, to microchip fabrication and integrated microfluidic systems for application in the clinical and forensic arenas. This includes two chapter the Tietz Handbook of Clinical Chemistry. He has edited three editions of the CRC Press Handbook of Capillary Electrophoresis, was the recipient of the 2008 Association for Lab Automation ‘Innovative Technology of the Year’ Award, and serves as the CoEditor-in-Chief for the journal Analytica Chimica Acta which currently has an impact factor of 6.58, and the recipient of the 2022 SCIEX Microscale Separations Innovation Medal and the 2023 AES Lifetime Award for Contributions to the Field of Electrophoresis.