Matthew Kerby

Matt joins Velocity with combined academic and industry bioengineering experience in microfluidics, drug discovery, quantitative modeling and structured data analysis. He holds a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering and is licensed in California as a Professional Chemical Engineer (PE). Matthew co-founded two life science companies, Lucidant Polymers and Cytomag, currently incubating in the Panorama Research Institute. He serves as co-chairman of the Life Science Angels BIO screening committee and has reviewed hundreds of proposals for funding.

In 1993, he earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Davis and obtained a M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from CSU Sacramento while working with the UC Davis Medical Center to create a mathematical model to quantitate diabetic severity in humans based on experimental tracer studies. He joined Point Biomedical Corp, a pre-IPO startup, as a research engineer to develop ultrasound contrast agent and formulate encapsulated drug delivery vehicles. These 5 micron-size particles were developed using optical test systems, lasers, microscopes and complex organic emulsions.

In 2000, he moved to Caliper Technologies, then post-IPO, to develop microfluidic tools for screening pharmaceutical inhibitors to human kinase enzymes. He worked with both the fundamental microfluidics group and systems integrations group to design complete assay platforms. He founded his own consulting company in 2003 and worked to engineer new fluidic products for cell transfection and pharmaceutical lyophilization. In 2004, he joined the Chemical and Biochemical Engineering laboratory of Dr. Anubhav Tripathi, an expert in fluid dynamics, at Brown University for Ph.D. studies. His thesis work integrated quantitative analysis of kinetics, microfluidics, molecular biology and viral diagnostics. The research increased the understanding of molecular conformation and structural influence on the mechanisms of transport, reaction kinetics and thermodynamic properties. He received a Ph.D. from Brown University in Biomedical Engineering in 2007 before moving to Stanford.

At Stanford University, he held a joint appointment in the departments of Engineering and Medicine as a Bioengineering Bio-X division postdoctoral scholar then staff. Matthew brought expert knowledge of device design and fabrication to enable several exciting collaborations on human stem cells, cancer cell resistance to therapeutics, next generation DNA sequencing and the properties of innate immune response. He has develop integrated fluidic systems for electronic field effect transistor (FET) based diagnostics and tissue encapsulation systems for bone regeneration using adult adipose stem cells. He has published and presented in the fields of microfluidics and biomolecular analysis.