Dr. Utku M. Sönmez, who graduated from ITU Mechanical Engineering Department in 2016, currently a postdoctoral fellow at University of California San Diego and Scripps Institute working with Profs. Darren Lipomi and Ardem Patapoutian who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine 2021 as a result of his significant contribution to the mechanobiology research. Utku’s research focuses on developing and employing microtechnological tools for mechanobiology research. He uses these tools to study how mechanical cues regulate biological systems at cellular and subcellular levels. Although it may not be obvious in the first sight, biological systems including humans would die immediately without a proper mechanical balance: Heart is a pump that has to pump an extremely accurate volume of blood with a precise pressure to both lungs and to the rest of the body. If not, you would either have hypertension or hypotension which is a purely mechanical phenomena and its misregulation is arguably fatal. Lungs, on the other hand, are simply heat and gas exchangers that should heat up the inhaled air and transfer its oxygen content to capillaries while removing carbon dioxide from the blood at very precise rate. Many other organs and tissues such as ear, skin, intestines, colon, and bladder also rely on mechanics for their proper function. All of these mechanical cues are being sensed and regulated by individual cells in our body and how they do it is a big question in biology and medicine. Utku applies mechanical engineering concepts developed to analyze cars, trains, planes, and rockets to analyze the mechanical functions of individual cells. He builds micro-engineered tools create different precisely defined mechanical microenvironments for cells and observes how these affect their biological functions. He started doing this kind of scientific research in the MEMS laboratory of Prof. Dr. Levent Trabzon while he was an undergraduate student in the Mechanical Engineering Department of Istanbul Technical University. His research was concerned with the design and fabrication of microfluidic chips which can enable the separation of rare circulating tumor cells from the blood. This project led to a publication in an international journal, a US patent, and a presentation in a scientific congress in Maryland, USA. All of these played a very important role in his admittance to Carnegie Mellon University as graduate student which is widely accepted as one of the best engineering schools in USA [1]. So far, his research led to 6 first-author research papers, 2 journal covers, 2 US patents and various conference awards.
[1] https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering-schools/eng-rankings
Figure 1: Dr. Utku M. Sonmez's article on Lab on a Chip letter cover.
Figure 2: A photo was taken on the day of graduation from the lab at Carnegie Mellon University, where Utku M. Sonmez did his PhD studies.
Figure 3: Dr. Utku M. Sonmez's American patent for microfluidic chip used without cell separation under the supervision of Prof. Dr Levent Trabzon.