James McGrath

James McGrath receives the Outstanding Faculty Award from Edmund Hajim.

James McGrath, professor of biomedical engineering, is the recipient of the 2019 Edmund A. Hajim Outstanding Faculty Award.

 “Jim leads a highly productive research laboratory dedicated to advancing novel technologies for fabricating nanomembranes for engineering applications in biosensing and separations processes,” said Hajim School Dean Wendi Heinzelman.

 “As founder and past-president of SiMPore, Jim has pioneered silicon- based nanomembrane and lab-on-a-chip technologies for biomedical engineering applications including hemodialysis, biosensing, and protein separations.”

McGrath graduated from Arizona State in 1991 with a BS degree in mechanical engineering. He earned a master's degree in mechanical engineering from MIT in 1994 and a PhD in biological engineering from Harvard/MIT's Division of Health Sciences and Technology in 1998.

 He then trained as a Distinguished Post-doctoral Fellow in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University.

Since 2001, McGrath has been on the Biomedical Engineering faculty at the University of Rochester. He served the department for over 10 years as the first director of the BME graduate program and is currently the Associate Director of URNano - the University’s core facility for nano/micro fabrication and metrology.

While historically, McGrath's research focused on the phenomena of cell migration, since 2007 has been leading the Nanomembrane Research Group - a highly interdisciplinary, multi-institutional team that is developing and applying ultrathin silicon ‘nanomembrane' technologies. McGrath is also a co-founder and past president of SiMPore Inc. a company founded to commercially manufacture the nanomembranes.

In 2015 McGrath was elected as a Fellow of AIMBE.