11/12/2025 Lauren Laws
Postdoctoral Fellow Jongwon Lim has been selected as a Postdoctoral Researcher Travel Awardee for the 2026 BMES-CMBE Conference, to be held in Puerto Rico in January 2026.
Written by Lauren Laws
The Biomedical Engineering Society Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering (CMBE) Postdoctoral Researcher Travel Award recognizes a postdoctoral research fellow who will attend the 2026 BMES Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Conference to present their outstanding research in the field of cellular and molecular bioengineering.
What's happening: Postdoctoral Fellow Jongwon Lim has been selected as a Postdoctoral Researcher Travel Awardee for the 2026 BMES-CMBE Conference, to be held in Puerto Rico in January 2026.
The big picture: Lim’s research has already received several honors and accolades, being named a 2025 Trailblazer in Engineering Fellow at Purdue University and a Joe Green Postdoctoral Fellow. His research focuses on treating dried blood as a material for diagnostics. During his PhD, he developed a novel blood-drying technique that reduces detection times for sepsis and hepatitis pathogens from five days to two and a half hours. As a graduate student in 2022, he co-led a paper on a point-of-care COVID-19 test that detected and differentiated the alpha variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus from earlier strains in saliva samples.
“Being selected for the BMES-CMBE Postdoctoral Researcher Travel Award is deeply meaningful to me. It not only recognizes our team’s efforts to push the boundaries of diagnostic science but also affirms the global need for faster, more accessible testing technologies. This award encourages me to continue translating our discoveries in molecular diagnostics into tools that can meaningfully improve patient care and expand access to healthcare in underserved regions.” - Postdoctoral Fellow Jongwon Lim
What's next: Lim will present his team’s latest research at the conference’s awards symposia, and he will be honored during the conference gala dinner alongside other awardees. His talk will focus on his team’s work on a CRISPR-Cascade diagnostic platform that detects pathogens from whole blood without nucleic acid amplification. Lim says he is grateful to the Materials Research Lab and the Joe Greene Postdoctoral Fellow Program, and his thankful to Professors Rashid Bashir and Paul Braun for their invaluable mentorship and continuous encouragement.
“Our OR-gated architecture, published earlier this year, achieved attomolar-level sensitivity and identified pathogens such as MRSA, MSSA, E. coli, and HBV in under ten minutes. Building on that foundation, I will present a new dual-blocking Cascade design that overcomes one of the most persistent challenges in CRISPR diagnostics: background activation. These advances bring us closer to the vision of a truly point-of-care diagnostic system that is rapid, highly sensitive, multiplexed, and fully amplification-free.” - Postdoctoral Fellow Jongwon Lim
Illinois Grainger Engineering Affiliations
Jongwon Lim is a Joe Greene Postdoctoral Fellow at the Materials Research Laboratory and is affiliated with the Department of Bioengineering within the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he works in Professor Rashid Bashir’s lab.
Rashid Bashir is the Dean of The Grainger College of Engineering and is a professor of bioengineering in the Department of Bioengineering and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, the Materials Research Laboratory and the University of Illinois Holonyak Micro + Nanotechnology Laboratory. Bashir holds the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering.
Paul Braun is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of materials science and engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He is affiliated with the Department of Chemistry, the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. He is director of the Materials Research Laboratory and holds a Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering appointment.