Adela Ben-Yakar

Ben-Yakar Group

Dr. Ben-Yakar Her research focuses on three main research directions. 1) Ultrafast laser microsurgery and nonlinear imaging, as applied to clinical image-guided surgery and diagnostics systems for treatment of disease such as spinal decompression, scarred vocal folds, and cervical cancer. 2) Development of high-throughput opto-fluidic systems for high-content testing using organoids and the small model organism, C. elegans, as applied to drug discovery, toxicity testing, nerve regeneration, and neurodegenerative diseases. 3) Development of ultrafast imaging modalities and instrumentation for 3D imaging flow cytometry and kHz volumetric imaging of brain function using LEAD (Line Excitation Array Detection) microscopy.

Dr. Ben-Yakar is a faculty member and area coordinator of the Thermal/Fluid Systems Area of the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering. She has served on the College of Engineering faculty since 2004. She is a regular member of the Graduate Studies Committee of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Ben-Yakar received multiple research grants from the National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) totaling more than $26 million dollars to support her research team. She has 8 issued and 7 pending patents. She has presented more than 120 plenary and invited talks at major conferences and research institutes around the world. She is the co-founder and CEO of a startup vivoVerse, which provides cost effective and rapid testing of drugs and chemicals using a high-throughput microfluidic imaging platform integrated with AI-enabled data analytics. 

Awards and Honors
  1. 2025: Received Endowed Cockrell Family Chair in Engineering.
  2. 2025: Her students, Aditya Roy and Daniel Wu, received Best Paper and Best Presentation Awards at Photonics West conference.
  3. 2024: Elected Conference Chair at the Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on the topic of “Optics and Photonics in Medicine and Biology”.
  4. 2023: Plenary Speaker at the Thermal and Fluids Engineering Conference (ASTFE), University of Maryland, College Park.
  5. 2022: Our article on ultrafast laser surgery was featured as one of the top downloaded papers in the Journal Biomedical Optics Express.
  6. 2020: Our article on automated microfluidics for stem cell research was featured by the editor of Biomicrofluidics as one of the top papers and promoted.
  7. 2019: Elected Fellow of The International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE) and American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).
  8. 2012: Received Human Frontier Science Program Award for studying dynamic mechanisms regulating embryonic stem cell fate choice. Dr.Ben-Yakar's team was selected as #3 among 800 applicants.
  9. 2011: Received prestigious NIH Director's Transformative Research Award. The $3 million dollar grant will provide support for developing the next generation microfluidic platforms for high-throughput drug screening for Alzheimer's disease using model organism, C. elegans.
  10. 2010: Received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.
Selected Publications
  1. Zhao, P., S. Mondal, C. Martin, A. DuPlissis, S. Chizari, K. Ma, R. Maiya, R. O. Messing N. Jiang, and A. Ben-Yakar, “Femtosecond laser microdissection for isolation of regenerating C. elegans neurons for single-cell RNA sequencing,” Nature Methods 20, pp. 590–599; doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-023-01804-3 (2023).
  2. Martin, C., L. Tianqi, P. Zhou, E. Hegarty, S. Modal, and A. Ben-Yakar, “Line excitation array detection fluorescence microscopy at 0.8 million frames per second,” Nature Communications 9 (1), pp. 4499; doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-06775-0 (2018).
  3. Mondal, S., E. Hegarty, C. Martin, S.K. Gökçe, N. Ghorashian, and A. Ben-Yakar, “Large-scale microfluidics providing high-resolution and high-throughput screening of Caenorhabditis elegans poly-glutamine aggregation model,” Nature Communications 7, Article number: 13023; doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms13023 (2016).
  4. Guo, X.S., Bourgeois, F., Chokshi, T., Durr, N.J., Hilliard, M., Chronis, N., and Ben-Yakar, A., "Femtosecond laser nanoaxotomy lab-on-a-chip for in-vivo nerve regeneration studies", Nature Methods, Vol. 5 (6), pp. 531-533; doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1203 (2008).
  5. Yanik, F., Cinar, H., Cinar, N., Chisholm, A., Jin, Y., and Ben-Yakar, A., "Neurosurgery: Functional regeneration after laser axotomy.", Nature, Vol. 432, pp. 882; doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/432822a (2004).
Most Recent Publications
  1. DuPlissis, A., A. Medewar, E. Hegarty, A. Laing, A. Shen, S. Gomez, S. Mondal, and A. Ben-Yakar, "Machine learning-based analysis of microfluidic device immobilized C. elegans for automated developmental toxicity testing,” Scientific Reports 15, 15; doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-84842-x (2025).
  2. Roy, A., A. DuPlissis, B. Mishra, and A. Ben-Yakar, “Deep operator networks for bioheat transfer problems with parameterized laser source functions,” International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 228, 125659; doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijheatmasstransfer (2024).
  3. Ҫamli, B., L. P. Andrus, A. Roy, B. Mishra, C. Xu, I. Georgakoudi, T. Tkaczyk, and A. Ben-Yakar, "Two photon imaging probe with highly efficient autofluorescence collection at high scattering and deep imaging conditions," Biomedical Optics Express, Vol. 15, Issue 5, 3163-3182; doi: https://doi.org/10.1364/BOE.520729 (2024).
  4. Roy, A. and A. Ben-Yakar, “Numerical study of a convective cooling strategy for increasing safe power levels in two-photon brain imaging,” Biomedical Optics Express, Vol. 15, Issue 2, pp. 540-557; doi: https://doi.org/10.1364/BOE.507517 (2024).
  5. Moshksayan K., A. Harihara, S. Mondal, E. Hegarty, T. Atherly, D. K. Sahoo, A. E. Jergens, J. P. Mochel, K. Allenspach-Jorn, J. Zoldan, and A. Ben-Yakar, “OrganoidChip facilitates hydrogel-free immobilization for fast and blur-free imaging of organoids”, Scientific Reports 13, 11268; doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-38212-8 (2023).Hoy, C.L., Everett W. N., Yildirim, M., Kobler J., Zeitels, S. M., and A. Ben-Yakar, "Towards endoscopic ultrafast laser microsurgery of vocal folds," J. Biomed. Opt., Vol. 17, (2012), 3, pp. 038002-038008
  6. Andrus, L., H. Jeon, M. Pawlowski, B. Debord, F. Gerome, F. Benabid, T. Mau, T. Tkaczyk, and A. Ben-Yakar, “Ultrafast laser surgery probe for sub-surface ablation to enable biomaterial injection in vocal folds,” Scientific Reports 12, Article number: 20554; doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-24446-5 (2022).
  7. Gabay, L., K. Subramanian, L. Andrus, A. DuPlissis, M. Yildirim, and A. Ben-Yakar, “In vivo hamster cheek pouch sub-epithelial ablation, biomaterial injection, and localization – pilot study,” J. Biomed. Optics 27(8), 080501; doi: https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JBO.27.8.080501 (2022).
  8. Subramanian, K., L. Andrus, and A. Ben-Yakar, “Ultrafast laser surgery probe with a calcium fluoride miniaturized objective for bone ablation,” Biomedical Optics Express, Vol. 12 (8), pp. 4779-4794; doi: https://doi.org/10.1364/BOE.426149 (2021).
  9. Laing, A.F., V. Tirumala, E. Hegarty, P. Zhao, W. B. Hamilton, J. M. Brickman, and A. Ben-Yakar, “An automated microfluidic device for time-lapse imaging of mouse embryonic stem cells,” Biomicrofluidics 13, 054102; doi: https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5124057 (2019).
  10. Ben-Yakar, A. “High-content and high-throughput in vivo drug screening platforms using microfluidics,” ASSAY and Drug Development Technologies, 2019 Jan;17(1), pp: 8-13, doi: https://doi.org/10.1089/adt.2018.908 (2019).
  11. Mondal, S., E. Hegarty, J. Sahn, L.L. Scott, S.K. Gökçe, C. Martin, N. Ghorashian, P. Satarasinghe, S. Iyer, W. Sae-Lee, T.R. Hodges, J.T. Pierce, S. F. Martin, and A. Ben-Yakar, “High-Content Microfluidic Screening Platform Used to Identify σ2R/Tmem97 Binding Ligands that Reduce Age-Dependent Neurodegeneration in C. elegans SC_APP Model,” ACS Chemical Neuroscience 6;9(5):1014-1026; doi: https://doi.org/10.1021/acschemneuro.7b00428 (2018).
    Durr, N.J., M. Ericson, and A. Ben-Yakar, "Multiphoton Luminescence from Gold Nanoparticles as a Potential Diagnostic Tool for Early Cancer Detection," Biosensors And Molecular Technologies For Cancer Diagnostics, (2012), pp. 307-322
  12. Gökçe, S.K., E.M. Hegarty, S. Mondal, P. Zhao, N. Ghorashian, M.A Hilliard, and A. Ben-Yakar, “A multi-trap microfluidic chip enabling longitudinal studies of nerve regeneration in Caenorhabditis elegans,” Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 9837; doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-10302-4 (2017).