Dr. Lai received her B.S. degree in Biochemistry from California State University, Los Angeles in 1999. She received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin in 2003. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 2003-2007. Dr. Lai joined the Department of Chemistry in 2007.
Dr. Lai’s research program focuses on both fundamental and applied aspects of biosensor research. The main objective of her research is the design and fabrication of folding- and dynamics-based electrochemical biosensors. She aims at developing portable real-time biosensors for environmental monitoring and point-of-care diagnostics. The sensing strategy is to link target-induced change in the conformation and/or flexibility of the biorecognition elements (e.g. peptides, nucleic acids) to a robust, electrochemical signaling mechanism. These sensors are reagentless, reusable, and insensitive to non-specific interactions of contaminants, thus enabling them to be employed directly in realistically complex media such as blood, urine, soil extracts, and a wide range of food matrices.