Loza Tadesse

Loza Tadesse is a PhD candidate in Bioengineering at Stanford University under the supervision of Prof. Jennifer Dionne. Her research develops a rapid, all-optical and label free bacterial diagnostic and antibiotic susceptibility testing system that aims to avoid the time consuming culturing step in gold standard methods. Prior to coming to Stanford, she was medical student at St. Paul Hospital Millennium Medical College in Ethiopia, where she had firsthand experience of the gravity of challenges patients and physicians face in resource limited clinical settings leading her to develop a strong interest in engineering point-of-care medical devices. Loza is a recipient of several awards including the Stanford EDGE, Agilent and DARE fellowships, the 2019 Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) career development award and the 2020 BIOX best poster presentation award. She is elected chair of the 2022 Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) on Plasmonics and Nanophotonics and co-founder of SciFro Summer School Program, which was recently awarded $200K from the Gates Foundation, on an effort aiming at inspiring local Ethiopian college students to develop point-of-care medical devices. She was a researcher at IBM Almaden research center and Los Alamos National Labs on several projects including, a patented works using bacteria for battery material design.