Tom Gaborski – Lab Director and Principal Investigator

Tom Gaborski, Ph.D.

Professor, Biomedical Engineering
Director, Biomedical and Chemical Engineering Ph.D. Program
CV (PDF), Link to RIT Faculty Profile, Google Scholar, Twitter

Tom is an entrepreneurial bioengineering faculty member and co-founder of a nanomaterials startup company. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Biological and Environmental Engineering from Cornell University and completed an M.S. and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Rochester. As a graduate student, he was a university presidential fellow and recipient of an NIH Individual Kirschstein-NRSA predoctoral fellowship. His graduate research focused on leukocyte recruitment and the biophysics of adhesion molecule mobility and surface localization. It was during this work that he became involved with the life science applications of a novel class of ultrathin membranes leading to the co-founding of SiMPore in 2007, where he helped raise two rounds of investment. While at SiMPore, he was the principal investigator on several NIH small business innovative research grants and brought several products to market. After serving as President of SiMPore, Dr. Gaborski joined the newly formed Biomedical Engineering Department at RIT in 2012 as the first permanent faculty member. He is an inventor on several issued patents in nanobiotechnology and author of more than 50 publications in Nature, ACS Nano, Small, Biomaterials, PNAS, and other scientific journals. As the director of the NanoBio Materials Laboratory at RIT, he leads a team studying and developing nanomembranes for tissue-on-a-chip and biological separations, including extracellular vesicle purification and wearable hemodialysis. His laboratory has been funded by four institutes at the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, New York State, the Hopeman Foundation, as well as multiple industry partners. He is also the Director of the Biomedical and Chemical Engineering Ph.D. program at RIT.

When not working, Tom likes to run (ideally on trails), ride bikes (mostly MTB these days with his kids), ski (he recently learned downhill after years of nordic racing), and attend to his mini-orchard. When not partaking in one of these hobbies, he’s probably hiking or camping with his family somewhere in the Adirondack Mountains.