A team of engineering graduate students at Yale is working to
create a new technology that could help prevent widespread food-
borne illness and lead to quicker diagnosis of bacterial
infections. The device, called alpha screen, is a portable,
rapid, pathogen scanner that can detect as few as one bacterium.
“A rapid pathogen screener is a device capable of detecting
microorganisms in near real-time, without the use of cultured
colonies or a traditional microbiology lab,” PhD student Monika
Weber told Security Management. Weber leads the development
team. Development of the device started as an assignment while
under instruction of Prof. Mark Reed, the Harold Hodgkinson
professor of engineering and applied science. The assignment was
to develop a device that had marketable potential. “We were
thinking about what kind of device would be beneficial….We
started asking doctors what areas of medical science could be
improved,” Weber said. Doctors told them that bacteria
diagnostics would be a promising focus area be