As an Assistant Professor for the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering since 2008, he established a research program focused on the creation and application of miniaturized, high-throughput robotic instrumentation to advance biomolecular science, along with the fundamental engineering that makes such instrumentation possible. Dr. Forest’s laboratory works at the intersection of bioMEMS, machine design, signal processing, optics, and manufacturing at the frontiers of the emerging bio-nano field.

Instruments developed in the Forest laboratory have led to the genesis of a new field of intracellular in vivo robotics for neuroscience, a new virus detector that is a 10-100x improvement over pre-existing technologies, a device for personalizing drug dosage to prevent heart attacks, and a parallelized genome-engineering technique. These instruments, and the discoveries they enable, are unlocking new frontiers in neuroscience and genetic science.