Samuel Sia, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, was appointed Vice Provost for the Fourth Purpose and Strategic Impact in January 2022. In this role, Professor Sia works to adapt organizational infrastructure to support activities that leverage scholarship for societal benefit, serves as a central resource for such initiatives, and helps remove barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration.
As both a scholar and a biotech entrepreneur, Professor Sia focuses on microfluidics and miniaturized wearable and implantable medical devices. He has collaborated extensively with colleagues across engineering and in public health, medicine, and business. His team developed a rapid, low-cost test to identify HIV and other infectious diseases, a rapid COVID-19 PCR test that is being commercialized, and a point-of-care prostate cancer test that was later FDA-approved. Professor Sia also co-founded Harlem Biospace, a biotech incubator launched in partnership with the New York City Economic Development Corporation that has hosted over 70 biotech startups since 2013. His work has been featured in both leading scientific journals and the international press.
He completed his bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry at the University of Alberta in Canada, a PhD in Biophysics as a Howard Hughes Predoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, and a postdoctoral fellowship in Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University.