Samuel Sia is Vice Provost for Fourth Purpose and Strategic Impact and a Professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University. His lab’s focuses on using microfluidics for global health diagnostics and for 3D tissue biology. He obtained his B.S. in biochemistry at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada), Ph.D. in Biophysics at Harvard University, and postdoctoral fellowship in Chemistry at Harvard University. He was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Predoctoral Fellow, National Science and Engineering Council of Canada Predoctoral Fellow, and Canadian Institute of Health Postdoctoral Fellow. Since 2005, he has been a faculty member of Columbia University’s Biomedical Engineering department. His lab’s work has been supported by the NIH, NSF, Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, American Heart Association, and World Health Organization. He has been named one of the world’s top young innovators by MIT Technology Review, and one of 10 innovators in human health and sustainability by NASA. He is a founder of Claros Diagnostics, a venture capital-backed company that is developing novel point-of-care diagnostics products; the company’s first microfluidics product for monitoring prostate cancer growth received European Union regulatory approval in 2010.