Rate My Professor Haim Bau

Haim H. Bau is the Richard H. & S. L. Gabel Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering. He received his BS in Mechanical Engineering from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa in 1969, MS in Mechanical Engineering from the Technion in 1973, and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University in 1980. Bau joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty in 1980 and has advanced through the ranks to his current distinguished position, which he assumed in 2022. His career has been marked by sustained contributions to the engineering faculty at Penn.

Bau's research specializations include fluid mechanics, heat transfer, electrokinetics, microfluidics, point-of-care diagnostics, and lab-on-a-chip systems. His work focuses on micro- and nano-scale fluidics for applications in biology and medicine, including portable analyzers and diagnostic platforms that integrate mechanics, electronics, and biology. He directs the Micro and Nano Fluidics Laboratory, pioneering technologies for liquid and particle manipulation, nucleic acid quantification, and rapid pathogen detection. Bau's scholarship has garnered over 20,000 citations according to Google Scholar. Notable publications include "Liquid transport in micron and submicron channels" (Pfahler, Harley, Bau, Zemel, Sensors and Actuators A: Physical, 1990); "Nuclemeter: A Reaction-Diffusion Based Method for Quantifying Nucleic Acids" (2014); "A Portable Analyzer for Pouch-Actuated, Immunoassay Cassettes" (2011); and "A Single and Two-Stage, Closed-Tube, Molecular Test for the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19)" (Song et al., 2020). He holds numerous patents related to diagnostic devices. Major awards include election as a 2025 National Academy of Inventors Fellow, the 2015 Penn One Health Award (with Changchun Liu), and the 2020 QED Proof-of-Concept Program award. Bau's innovations have significantly impacted biomedical engineering and diagnostics.