Biography

Professor Hawkins received a BS in Electrical Engineering from CSU, Fresno, in 2005 and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Cornell University in 2011.  His undergraduate work focused on electromagnetism, and his culminating project was a loosely-coupled inductive power transfer system for charging car batteries.  His dissertation work was completed under Prof. Brian Kirby in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dept. and focused on the use of electrokinetic techniques. specifically dielectrophoresis, to manipulate and analyze mycobacteria (related to tuberculosis) in microfluidic systems.  He continued his work on microfluidic systems, this time focusing on the growth of clinically relevant bacterial biofilms as a Research Fellow for the National Academy of Sciences at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).  After completing his work at NIST, from 2012 to 2016 Prof. Hawkins taught at San Jose State University (SJSU) in the Biomedical, Chemical, and Materials Engineering Department.  Throughout his time at SJSU, he worked on undergraduate and graduate projects that lie at the intersection between Electrical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering, focusing on the use of microfluidics to determine the efficacy and effect of antibiotic treatments on bacterial biofilms.

Research Interests

Biosensors
Dielectrophoresis
Electrokinetics
Electromagnetics
Microfabrication
Microfludiics