Dr. Stuart Ibsen joined OHSU in 2017 and uses his broad background in physics, engineering, and zoology, to develop comprehensive and novel approaches to study biological questions. His lab focuses on the development of new cancer screening techniques, novel noninvasive neural modulation techniques, and the development of light activatable chemotherapy prodrugs.

Dr. Ibsen received a Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Hawaii studying bioacoustics with a focus on dolphin echolocation. He then received a second Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of California San Diego with a focus on drug delivery for chemotherapy applications.

His first postdoc was conducted with Dr. Shrekanth Chalasani at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies developing a technique to genetically sensitize neurons to an ultrasound pulse called Sonogenetics.

He conducted a second postdoc at the UCSD Moores Cancer Center developing a high conductance dielectrophoresis technique to recover drug delivery vehicles from undiluted human plasma.

He conducted a third postdoc at the UCSD Nanoengineering Department developing a high conductance dielectrophoresis technique to collect cancer-derived exosomes from human plasma. He also developed methods for on chip immunostaining of cancer-related proteins on the surface of the exosomes.

Dr. Ibsen conducted his final postdoc at University College London in the UK working with Dr. Stefan Guldin developing therapeutic drug monitoring systems to help identify which cancer patients are high metabolizers of the chemotherapy drug to develop personalized drug dosing.