SEMSS 2026 Keynote Speakers
Wilbur A. Lam, MD, PhD
Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University
W. Paul Bowers Research Chair of Pediatrics
Associate Dean of Innovation, Emory University School of Medicine
Wilbur A. Lam, M.D., Ph.D. is a physician-scientist-engineer who is a Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, the W. Paul Bowers Research Chair of Pediatrics and Associate Dean of Innovation at the Emory University School of Medicine as well as a physician at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, where he also serves as Chief Innovation Officer of the Pediatric Technology Center.
Dr. Lam obtained his B.A. from Rice University, his M.D. from Baylor College of Medicine, and his bioengineering Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Francisco, where he also completed his clinical training in pediatrics and pediatric hematology/oncology. Dr. Lam’s interdisciplinary laboratory serves as a unique “one-stop shop” in which they develop microsystems- and smartphone-based platforms to study and diagnose pediatric and blood diseases and then directly translate those technologies to his patients. His lab’s basic science interests involve developing and leveraging microfluidic devices as in vitro models of hematologic diseases, including sickle cell disease and bleeding/clotting disorders and this work has been published in Nature, PNAS, Blood, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Communications, and Nature Materials among other high tier journals. With an interest in home-based and smartphone-based diagnostics, the Lam Lab is also dedicated to further developing their technologies as novel “cheap tech” solutions to enable and empower pediatric patients to more easily monitor their own diseases at home and in the global health and rural settings (Nature Communications, Journal of Clinical Investigation). Dr. Lam has also co-founded and serves/served as chief medical officer for three medical device startups based on his laboratory’s research, one of which obtained FDA clearance for a home-based anemia self-test and one was acquired by Johnson & Johnson. In addition, Dr. Lam is a principal investigator of the Atlanta Center for Microsystems Engineered Point-Of-Care Technologies (ACME POCT), which is part of the NIH’s Point-of-Care Technologies Research Network and served as the Test Verification Core of the NIH RADx initiative for COVID-19 diagnostic testing (Nature Biotechnology, JAMA). Under Dr. Lam’s leadership, the ACME POCT has received ~$150M of NIH funding to date for assessment of diagnostic technologies since the pandemic.
Among other honors, Dr. Lam has been elected into the National Academy of Medicine and the American Society of Clinical Investigation, is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors, is a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, named an Emerging Investigator by the journal Lab-on-a-Chip published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, and is recipient of an NSF Career Award as well as the American Society of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology’s Frank A. Oski Memorial Lectureship Award, the Lab on a Chip and Dolomite Pioneers of Miniaturization Lectureship Award, and an Emerging Investigator Award by the NHLBI of the NIH. His laboratory’s research is funded by the NIH, NSF, FDA, the American Heart Association, the Coulter Foundation, the Department of Defense, and the Georgia Research Alliance. More recently, he was named Director of the Center for the Advancement of Diagnostics for a Just Society based at Emory, Georgia Tech, and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
David E. Clapham, MD, PhD
Emeritus Professor of Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School
Former Aldo R. Castañeda Professor of Cardiovascular Research, Boston Children’s Hospital
Former CSO of HHMI
David Clapham, MD, PhD, is an emeritus Professor of Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and the former Aldo R. Castañeda Professor of Cardiovascular Research at Boston Children’s Hospital. He was an HHMI Investigator from 1997-2016, when he became the CSO of HHMI (2016-2022), and a senior group leader at Janelia, retiring 11/2025. Early in his career, he received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering followed by MD and PhD degrees. He was an internal medical resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and carried out postdoctoral research under a Fulbright Award with Erwin Neher at the MPI, Göttingen.
Dr. Clapham’s most recent research focused on ion channel structure, function, and regulation, with specific emphasis on calcium signaling pathways (TRP channels), G protein-coupled receptors and organellar channels of mitochondria, primary cilia, and lysosomes. He trained 56 predoctoral students and 103 postdoctoral fellows, most of whom have established independent research programs at universities. He served as President of the Society of General Physiologists, chaired NIH study section, and served on editorial boards of Cell, Neuron, Science, and PNAS. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000), National Academy of Sciences (2006), and National Academy of Medicine (2021).