Karina Torres-Castro

        I am an associate researcher (Intl. Assoc.) in the BioMEMS Lab from the Biophysical and Biomedical Measurements Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST. I obtained my Ph.D. at the Charles L. Brown Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the  University of Virginia. I work developing microfluidic microsystems for measuring different biophysical and/or condensed matter properties. I received my B.Sc. (Lic.) in Chemical Engineering at the  Universidad de Costa Rica and a M.Sc. in Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) at the  Tecnológico de Costa Rica.  Previously I spent 8 years working as an engineer in the private and public sector. Email contact: karina.torrescastro@nist.gov

Research

	Dielectrophoretic enrichment of live chemo-resistant circulating-like pancreatic cancer cells from media of drug-treated adherent cultures of solid tumors. Aditya Rane, Javad Jarmoshti, Abdullah Bin-Siddique, Sara Adair, Karina Torres-Castro, Carlos Honrado, Todd W. Bauer, Nathan S. Swami. Lab on a Chip.
	Microfluidic Blood Separation: Key Technologies and Critical Figures of Merit. Karina Torres-Castro, Katherine Acuna-Umana, Leonardo Lesser-Rojas, Darwin R. Reyes. Micromachines. *Review*
	Multichannel Impedance Cytometry Downstream of Cell Separation by Deterministic Lateral Displacement to Quantify Macrophage Enrichment in Heterogeneous Samples. Karina Torres-Castro, Javad Jarmoshti, Li Xiao, Aditya Rane, Armita Salahi, Li Jin, Xudong Li, Federica Caselli & Carlos Honrado, Nathan S. Swami. Advanced Materials Technologies. *-Selected as inside cover-*
	Biophysical quantification of reorganization dynamics of human pancreatic islets during co-culture with adipose-derived stem cells. Karina Torres-Castro, Mohammad S. Azimi, Walter B. Varhue, Carlos Honrado, Shayn M. Peirce & Nathan S. Swami. Analyst
	On-chip microfluidic buffer swap of biological samples in-line with downstream dielectrophoresis. XuHai Huang, Karina Torres-Castro, Walter Varhue, Aditya Rane, Ahmed Rasin & Nathan S. Swami. ELECTROPHORESIS : Equal Contributors --Best Paper Award!* (June 2022)
	Thermal Analysis of Microfluidic cooling in Processing-in-3D-Stacked Memory. Jun-Han Han, Karina Torres-Castro, Robert E. West, Nathan S. Swami & Mircea Stan. 2021 22nd International Conference on Thermal, Mechanical and Multi-Physics Simulation and Experiments in Microelectronics and Microsystems EuroSimE
	Power and Thermal Modeling of In-3D-Memory Computing. Jun-Han Han, Robert E. West, Karina Torres-Castro, Nathan S. Swami, Samira Khan & Mircea Stan. 2021 International Symposium on Devices, Circuits and Systems ISDCS
	Self-aligned sequential lateral field non-uniformities over channel depth for high throughput dielectrophoretic cell deflection. XuHai Huang, Karina Torres-Castro, Walter B. Varhue, Armita Salahi, Ahmed Rasin, Carlos Honrado, Audrey Brown, Jennifer Guler & Nathan S. Swami. Lab on a Chip *Lab on a Chip HOT Articles 2021 -Selected as inside front cover-*
	Microfluidic Cooling for 3D-IC with 3D Printing Package. Jun-Han Han, Karina Torres-Castro, Robert E. West, Walter B. Varhue, Nathan S. Swami & Mircea Stan. IEEE SOI-3D-Subthreshold Microelectronics Technology Unified Conference S3S
	High-throughput dynamical analysis of dielectrophoretic frequency dispersion of single cells based on deflected flow streamlines. Karina Torres-Castro, Carlos Honrado, Walter B. Varhue, Vahid Farmehini & Nathan S. Swami. Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry *-Selected as forefront cover-*
	Combined electrokinetic manipulations of pathogenic bacterial samples in low-cost fabricated dielectrophoretic devices. Alejandro Martinez-Brenes, Karina Torres-Castro, Richard Marin-Benavides, Katherine Acuña-Umaña, Christopher Espinoza-Araya, Raquel Ramírez-Carranza, Gabriela González-Espinoza, Norman Rojas-Campos, Caterina Guzmán-Verri, Giovanni Sáenz-Arce & Leonardo Lesser-Rojas. AIP Advances

Conferences

ONRG/AFOSR-Costa Rica-Taiwan: Invited speaker at the 1st Advanced Materials Workshop "From Bioinspiration to Technological Innovation"

AES Electrophoresis Society meeting at SciX 2023: Invited speaker in the AES Early career session: On-chip multichannel impedance cytometry for phenotypic monitoring of microfluidic separations

MicroTAS (uTAS), Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences 2023: Crossover Cell Migration Measurements (CCM): Comprehensive optical and electrical cell tracking (Poster)

Gordon Research Conference (GRC) 2023, Microscale Systems: From Physical Phenomena to Biological Applications: Leveraging multiple surface acoustic waves (SAW) interrogation points for precise flow measurements (Poster)

Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) 2023, Leveraging Microscale Fluidic Phenomena for Novel Analyte Measurements: Leveraging multiple surface acoustic waves (SAW) interrogation points for precise flow measurements (Oral presentation)

Dielectrophoresis 2021: Sidewall electrodes in a microchannel for high-throughput dielectrophoretic separations (Poster)

MicroTAS (uTAS), Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences 2020: Biomechanical Markers for Monitoring Heterogeneity in Islet Reorganization Dynamics with Adipose Stem Cells (Poster)

AES Electrophoresis Society 2018: Microfluidic Dielectrophoresis Cytometry for Single-Cell Analysis to Quantify Phenotypic Heterogeneity (Poster)

Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Meeting 2017: Aptamer-Based Nanoslit Platforms for Characterizing Human Performance Biomarkers (Oral Presentation)

Dielectrophoresis 2016: Low-cost Fabrication of Dielectrophoretic Devices for Electrokinetic Characterization of Tropical Infectious Bacterial Samples (Poster)