Saad Bhamla Sees Engineering as a Superpower
Saad Bhamla seeks the joy of discovery.
After joining CU Boulder this summer as an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering, Saad Bhamla now runs a research lab in the BioFrontiers Institute. Through his work, he seeks to understand — and sometimes recreate — the intricate workings of biological systems ranging from worm blobs and slingshot spiders to flamingos and sled dogs. He also develops accessible technology to help address global challenges such as hearing loss and disease detection, making him a leader in a movement known as “frugal science.”
Interdisciplinary research is the heart of your work. Why is this important?
Nature doesn’t know chemistry, physics, math or biology. I see these disciplines as different types of lenses, and I think of myself as putting on a different set of lenses when I’m looking at a system. We need all of them to fully understand the complex relationships that most living systems have.
I also have to think this way when we’re solving problems through frugal science. Anybody can build a widget, but it’s not going to save lives right away. The technology is not enough. You have to think about policy, communication and healthcare workers. Interdisciplinary approaches are the way we make some headway into understanding and actually making a dent in a problem.
What drives your curiosity?
I just want to solve puzzles. I like figuring stuff out. There’s nothing like the joy of discovery. It happens during the point in a project where I feel like me and another team member — a graduate, PhD student or postdoc — are the only people on the planet, past or present, who know this thing we’ve just figured out. I would pay a million dollars to feel this feeling, and I want others to experience it as well.
What’s the most important thing you’ve learned from our natural environment?
I had the opportunity to go to Madagascar, and within minutes, I saw Darwin’s hawk moths and flying jewel beetles. It made me realize that one lifetime is not enough to study this. There are endless life forms out there.
Over the past 10 years of traveling to the Amazon, I’ve seen the forest and the number of species in it shrink, thanks to things like illegal mining and deforestation. So there’s a bit of urgency to study things before they disappear.
How would you best describe frugal science, and why did that draw your interest?
I thought I had a vision of what success looked like, but after selling one of my inventions to a Fortune 500 company, I felt hollow and empty. Soon after, I heard about professor Manu Prakash at Stanford, who had built a $1 microscope. I was like, ‘This is the kind of stuff I want to learn how to do.’ And so during my postdoc, I invented a paper centrifuge, which is a simple string and piece of paper that could do diagnostics for anemia or malaria. What is innovation if it’s not accessible to everybody?
What are you most proud of?
When I was an undergrad in Madras, I remember buying my first phone. Then I went to Mumbai to visit my grandparents, and I realized my grandmother was losing her hearing. I wanted to buy a hearing aid for her, but they were too expensive. Why could I afford a phone but not a hearing aid? One of the first things I did as a scientist was work with a student to build an effective, commercially competitive $1 hearing aid. To be able to engineer is a superpower. You see a problem, and you solve it.
What else should we know about your work?
I want science and art to intertwine. I have a comic book I made about extraordinary organisms, and I’d love to have murals in our BioFrontiers building. Scientists often think that cool science will translate to the public, but we need to put some effort into sharing the beauty. And why should everything be in English? There are more universal ways to communicate. Science is everyone’s treasure.
Photos by Glenn Asakawa (Jour’86)