[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Hollenhorst.jpg” caption=”James Hollenhorst, vice-president and director of Molecular Technology at Agilent Laboratories in Santa Clara, California, is the keynote speaker at the 29th Annual Bell Canada Lecture. Photo courtesy of the Faculty of Engineering.”]What do you get when you shrink electronics to an almost invisible size and then add DNA or other molecular structures? The next generation of diagnostic and treatment devices.

James Hollenhorst, vice-president and director of Molecular Technology at Agilent Laboratories in Santa Clara, California, is the keynote speaker at the 29th annual Bell Lecture. He will speak about breakthroughs in electronics and biology, how they are converging at the molecular scale, and potential applications in healthcare and the environment.

This free public lecture will be held in the Michael G. DeGroote Centre for Learning and Discovery (MDCL), Room 1105 on Monday, Feb. 12 from 5 to 6:30 p.m. Light refreshments will be served.

In his presentation, Parallel Revolutions: How Breakthroughs in Electronics and Biology are Converging at the Molecular Level, Hollenhorst will describe some of the new measurement methods enabled by applying the techniques of electronics to the problems of life scientists.

For example, DNA microarrays use methods pioneered in the electronics industry to measure the expression of every human gene in one experiment. The lab-on-a-chip technology enables the measurement of thousands of proteins in one experiment. New ultra-high-throughput sequencing techniques will enable the complete human genome to be measured for less than $1,000.

Hollenhorst leads Agilent's research in life science, chemical analysis, nanotechnology and MEMS. Formerly, he was director of electronics research for Agilent Technologies. He joined Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in 1990 and led research in high-speed electronics, optoelectronics, and measurement technologies. Before HP, he was with Bell Laboratories, where he worked on high-speed electronics and optoelectronics.

He serves on several academic and industrial advisory boards, is a former editor of the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, a member of the Governing Board of the American Institute of Physics, and a Fellow of the IEEE. He received a PhD in physics from Stanford University.

The Bell Lecture series was created in honour of Alexander Graham Bell and features an outstanding speaker on a topic in information and emerging technologies. It is organized by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

For further information, please visit www.ece.mcmaster.ca or contact Hamida Najak at 905-525-9140, ext. 24347 or href=”mailto:najakh@mcmaster.ca”>najakh@mcmaster.ca.