John Dzung Hoang Mai

Biography

Dr. Mai’s academic and professional engineering career is defined by multi-disciplinary, multi-institute collaborations in order to apply basic research results to solve high-value problems. He hopes to share his experiences by teaching and mentoring students who will become the futures leaders and innovators in biomedical engineering. He also hopes that students who view this biography will see the interesting career possibilities when one develops a passion for finding, understanding, and solving practical engineering problems.

Prior to joining the BME department in 2024, Dr. Mai was the senior director of engineering at the Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering at USC. There he worked on commercializing hyperspectral imaging hardware and software, originally developed by researchers in the Translational Imaging Center at USC, into venture-funded companies. AMI also collaborated with Nokia Bell Labs to integrate their optical coherence tomography “on-a-chip” for medical imaging and commercialization, with critical contributions from senior clinicians and researchers from the Department of Otolaryngology- Head and Neck Surgery, Keck School of Medicine of USC.

Previously, as the Principal Engineer in the Sensors Applications Lab, Central Hardware Engineering Institute at Huawei Technologies, he was responsible for developing their global pipeline of biosensors for smart phone and wearable applications targeted at wellness and health monitoring. This includes initiating collaborations with major European institutes including CEA/LETI and IMEC. Other industry experience includes a role as the Deputy Chief Operating Officer of Vialogy, a public company whose founders were originally from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His team developed a sensor interoperability middleware that was recognized by a Frost & Sullivan North American Product Innovation Award, and was demonstrated worldwide within Cisco Systems IPICS routers.

As a Visiting Assistant Professor at the City University of Hong Kong, and as a Special Researcher at the Industrial Technology Research Institute in Hsinchu, Taiwan, Dr. Mai has been the PI on projects to demonstrate the commercial viability of various bioMEMS platforms and opto-fluidic devices for rare cell sorting. He received his PhD from UCLA under the guidance of Prof. Chih-Ming Ho. He was awarded a Dean’s Post-doctoral Fellowship from the Stanford School of Medicine to investigate MEMS devices for the rapid detection of uropathogens under the direction of Prof. Joseph Liao, MD; Department of Urology.