Dr. Juliane Sempionatto received her B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Sao Paulo (USP), M.S. in Material Science Engineering from Sao Paulo State University (UNESP), and Ph.D. degree (with highest honors) in Nanoengineering from the University of California San Diego (UCSD). She was a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) from 2021 to 2023. In April 2024, she joined the Rice University, Houston, Texas, faculty, where she is the James J. Truchard endowed chair Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a member of the Digital Health Initiative.
Dr. Sempionatto is the recipient of the prestigious Siebel Scholar Award (class of 2021), the IUPAC Young Chemist Award (2022), MIT 35 under 35 Latin America (2022), and the Distinguished Female Scientist Brazil (2024). She has been listed as a Highly Cited Researcher and has been a keynote and plenary speaker at several conferences.
Her research is related to developing wearable and point-of-care biosensors capable of real-time non-invasive monitoring of medical-relevant biomarkers. Dr Sempionatto designed and built biosensors to measure chemical analytes in sweat, saliva, tears, interstitial fluid, wound fluid, urine, and blood. The focus of her research is the development of multimodal and multiplex wearable devices, meaning that several sensor modalities, including chemical sensors and physiological sensors (heart rate, blood pressure), are fabricated in the same platform to measure comprehensive information about health status. Moreover, Dr Sempionatto has a great interest in new surface chemistry for biosensors, energy harvesters, microfluidic devices, new materials and electrode fabrication, miniaturized electronics, and machine learning.