Henry Cheng

About Henry

as of 2/2010: Henry Cheng recently graduated with a BS in biological engineering with honors from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he was a Regents Scholar. With funding from a two- year National Institutes of Health undergraduate fellowship, he completed an honors thesis which involved prototyping electrode chips from ordinary compact discs and optimizing DNA detection techniques. He also spent two summers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Massachusetts General Hospital, where he helped to develop devices for ultrasensitive protein detection and virus counting, respectively. Henry is passionate about public policy advocacy. Two successful initiatives he led at the University of Hawaii at Manoa resulted in City Council approval to add the campus to the final route of a proposed mass transit rail system, and Board of Regents and City Council approval for a $20 per semester/student fee to provide every student with unlimited access to the city bus. He plans to obtain a PhD in Bioengineering, as well as a Master’s of Public Health. He believes that portable, rapid, and inexpensive diagnostic devices will be an important component of infectious disease control, and aspires to develop such technologies and make sure they are widely available in the developing regions where they are needed most.