He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from The Ohio State University in 2005 and obtained his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009 all in Mechanical Engineering. His doctoral research focused on measurement of the mechanical behavior of biological cells and molecules. He then pursued post-doctoral research at the Technische Universität München in Biophysics working in DNA nanotechnology. Since 2011, Dr. Castro has established a state-of-the-art lab for the design and fabrication of mechanical DNA nanodevices to probe the physical properties of molecular and cellular systems and was recently awarded a National Science Foundation Career Award.