Katherine Elvira

Katherine is the Canada Research Chair in New Materials and Techniques for Health Applications, a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar in partnership with the Pacific Alzheimer Research Foundation, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Victoria, Canada.

Katherine received her undergraduate integrated Bachelor's and Master’s degree in Chemistry from Imperial College London in 2007. She started working in the field of microfluidics during her PhD (2012, Imperial College London), by building digital microfluidic platforms to perform automated chemical reactions. Katherine then moved to ETH Zürich working firstly as a Postdoctoral Researcher and then as a Senior Scientist in the Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering. During this time, Katherine developed a variety of microfluidic platforms for applications such as the quantification of lipid digestion, the safe generation of singlet oxygen for organic synthesis and the rapid determination of distribution coefficients.

Katherine’s group at the University of Victoria develops microfluidic (lab-on-a-chip) technologies to build bespoke artificial cells and tissues for drug discovery and development applications. Katherine has recently presented this work at the Gordon Research Conference on Drug Metabolism (2019), is Co-Chair for the Gordon Research Conference on the Physics and Chemistry of Microfluidics (2024) and is a Scientific Mentor for the Creative Destruction Lab.