Rate My Professor David Collins

Associate Professor David Collins heads the Collins BioMicrosystems Laboratory in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Melbourne, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology. He earned his PhD in Engineering from Monash University in 2015, for which he received the Bill Melbourne Medal for the best engineering PhD thesis. Prior to his appointment at the University of Melbourne in late 2018 as Lecturer and subsequent promotion to Associate Professor, Collins completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Research Laboratory of Electronics from September 2017 to September 2018 and briefly served as Lecturer in the Division of Engineering Product Development at the Singapore University of Technology and Design in early 2017. His academic career is marked by the Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) in 2020, providing $448,058 for research in advanced microscale manipulation technologies.

Collins specializes in acoustofluidics, with research interests encompassing surface acoustic waves for particle and cell manipulation, microfluidics, 3D bioprinting, acoustic holography, and biomicrosystems for tissue engineering and single-cell analysis. His contributions have garnered over 5,250 citations on Google Scholar, reflecting substantial influence in the field. Notable publications include 'The Poisson distribution and beyond: methods for microfluidic droplet production and single cell encapsulation' (Lab on a Chip, 2015; 676 citations), 'Two-dimensional single-cell patterning with one cell per well driven by surface acoustic waves' (Nature Communications, 2015; 667 citations), 'Continuous micro-vortex-based nanoparticle manipulation via focused surface acoustic waves' (Lab on a Chip, 2017; 240 citations), 'Acoustic tweezers via sub-time-of-flight regime surface acoustic waves' (Science Advances, 2016; 187 citations), 'Programmable Acoustic Holography using Medium-Sound-Speed Modulation' (Advanced Science, 2023), and 'Dynamic interface printing' (Nature, 2024). Through his laboratory, Collins advances high-speed 3D bioprinters and acoustofluidic devices, enabling breakthroughs in drug discovery and human tissue engineering.