Malav Desai

Malav Desai has worked in a variety of roles in the scientific and medical fields. In 2020, they began working as a Scientific Education Engineer III at Emerald Cloud Lab, where they also held the role of Scientific Education Engineer II. In this role, they conducted training and held one-on-one sessions with clients to help them gain experience in the cloud lab environment, as well as developing hands-on exercises to improve the quality of new-user trainings. Malav also held the role of Scientific Developer I, during which they developed a symbolic lab language in Mathematica to integrate droplet digital PCR instrumentation into ECL software suite, and tracked errors in software and experimentation by performing QA testing and database queries. In 2019, Desai was a Consultant at Voyage Biomedical, working with the team to develop a brain cooling medical device to decrease damage from cerebral ischemia and developing automated data collection hardware and software to monitor and display real-time test data. From 2011 to 2019, Desai was a Postdoctoral Researcher and Graduate Student at the University of California, Berkeley. As a Postdoctoral Researcher, they evaluated material biosafety using a mouse model and conducted customer discovery through Bay Area I-Corps for a potential start-up with medical adhesives. As a Graduate Student, they developed a light-responsive composite hydrogel that can be actuated like a laser and demonstrated movement and locomotion of the hydrogel actuator.

Malav Desai attended Rutgers University from 2007 to 2011, where they earned a Bachelor's Degree in Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering. Malav then attended the University of California, Berkeley from 2011 to 2017, where they earned a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering.