Manu Prakash is Associate Professor of Bioengineering, Biology (courtesy), and Oceans (courtesy) at Stanford University and co-founder of Foldscope Instruments, Planktoscope, and Cephla. Manu graduated with an undergraduate degree in theoretical computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he completed a PhD in applied physics. Manu started his lab at Stanford in 2011, where he coined the term ‘curiosity-driven science’ to describe the breadth of his research. The lab combines asking questions about the extremes of biology with developing frugal science projects to democratize access to technology, allowing more people to be curious. His best-known frugal science project is the paper-based microscope, Foldscope, and its associated programs that serve more than 2.5 million children worldwide.
The lab uses interdisciplinary approaches, including theory and experiments, to understand how computation is embodied in biological matter. Examples include cognition in single-cell protists and morphological computing in animals with no neurons and the origins of complex behavior in multicellular systems. Broadly, we invent new tools for studying non-model organisms with a significant focus on life in the ocean – addressing fundamental questions such as how cells sense pressure or gravity?
Finally, we are dedicated to inventing and distributing “frugal science” tools to democratize access to science (previous inventions used worldwide: Foldscope, Abuzz), diagnostics of deadly diseases like malaria, and convening global citizen science communities to tackle planetary-scale environmental challenges such as mosquito surveillance or plankton surveillance by citizen sailors mapping the ocean in the age of Anthropocene. In the context of the open ocean, we work on new instruments and methodologies to map and measure deep-ocean biomass and how it couples with Earth-scale carbon models.
Cruises:
